Can I mix Qt VS Tools with Visual Studio's "Linux development with C++" to build a Qt app on Linux?

[D.Shinaberry]

In my searching, I haven't found anything directly on topic about this. So, I thought I'd post here. Full disclosure: I am quite new and green with respect to Qt.

I've tinkered enough to be able to use the Qt VS Tools to create a Qt project that builds for Windows using Visual Studio 2017.
And I've created a C++ project using the "Linux development with C++" that builds on Linux using Visual Studio 2017.

Now I'd like to mix the two in order to build my Qt app on both Windows and Linux using Visual Studio 2017 to perform both builds.

The Qt VS Tools documentation talks about creating a .pro file and exporting the project in order to build on other platforms. This would seem to indicate that it is not possible to do what I'd like. But, I'm not sure whether this is a hard requirement or just reflects the state of things when the documentation was written.

So, is it possible to mix the two and build a Qt app from Visual Studio for both Windows and Linux platforms? If so, can someone give me an outline of the steps to follow to achieve this?

Many Thanks

[JKSH]

Hi @D-Shinaberry, and welcome!

I don't know if this is possible, so I'll let someone else reply. If you don't get any responses here within a week, try subscribing to the Interest mailing list and asking there. Qt Company engineers are active on that list.

[micosta]

Hi,

is it possible to mix the two and build a Qt app from Visual Studio for both Windows and Linux platforms?

Short answer is no, not yet. But it will be in relative short order. We’re planning on expanding the existing Qt/MSBuild targets so that they can also be used for cross-compilation. This will allow creating Qt-enabled MSVC projects that target “linux” (read: an SSH -accessible compilation server with GNU toolchain).

At the moment, the plan is to release this new feature by the summer of 2020.

Regards,
--Miguel Costa

[aha_1980]

@micosta

This will allow creating Qt-enabled MSVC projects that target “linux” (read: an SSH -accessible compilation server with GNU toolchain).

Wow. That is not even possible with Creator ATM, though there is a suggestion open for long time: QTCREATORBUG-16246

Regards

[micosta]

Quick update: we've just added a post on the Qt blog about this topic.
Please check it out and feel free to leave any comments/questions/suggestions there.

Regards,
--Miguel Costa

[Frank Zhang]

@micosta as you mentioned above, the plan to having a release in this summer, which supports QT development Linux application on VS - windows platform. Any update on this?

[micosta]

@D-Shinaberry said in Can I mix Qt VS Tools with Visual Studio's "Linux development with C++" to build a Qt app on Linux?:

is it possible to mix the two and build a Qt app from Visual Studio for both Windows and Linux platforms?

Yes!

Quick update: we've now released version 2.6 of the Qt Visual Studio Tools; this new version allows Qt/MSBuild projects to be built both for Windows (msvc) and Linux (VS Linux development workload). We've posted part 1 of an extensive how-to that details the steps needed to create from scratch a multi-platform Qt project in Visual Studio (part 1) (part 2).

Let us know if you have any comments/questions/suggestions.

[Frank Zhang]

I cannot build my QT project and what I can see here is,

and even if I remove all "windows" targets, it's still not working.

[Frank Zhang]


the picture above is showing some resource cannot be loaded correctly.

[Frank Zhang]

Just attached the picture again.