Preparing For Qt Development

Qt has its own IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called QtCreator.  Qt also requires all the various Qt libraries as well as Qt header files and several utilities.  Qt has its own make system called Qmake, but QtCreator is also compatible with CMake, so Qmake won't be used.

For Windows, the best way to start is to simply install the Qt SDK (Software Development Kit) that contains and installs all the necessary programs and files.  The current SDK, version 1.2.1, which contains Qt libraries version 4.8.1 and QtCreator version 2.4.1 as well as MinGW compiler suite.  However, the version of MinGW installed contains an older GCC, version 4.4.  Although it can easily be made to work with an existing MSYS/MinGW installation like the one the project has been using based on GCC 4.6.2.

Several choices of installers are available, a small on-line installer and a very large off-line installer.  The off-line installer has the advantage of quick reinstalls.  However, the on-line installer only downloads the components selected during installation so potentially there is much less to download (more can be downloaded and installed later if needed).  Many of the components are unnecessary when strictly used for desktop development (for example, all the mobile development files can be ignored).  Next post, installation...