Debugging with CMake projects: The application could not start because its parallel configuration is incorrect

Cosmo Zhang

Hello,

I'm learning to use CMake to build my Qt project. But there seems to be some problems with my toolchain. It seems that the executables built from my CMake project is broken. But for QMake projects everything goes OK.

My environment:
Platform: Windows 11
Qt Creator: 9.0.2
Qt: 5.12.8
MSVC version: MSVC2015 64bit

Here is how I reproduce this problem:

Problem with cmake: In Qt Creator, create a new project with the "Qt Console Application" template. Select cmake as the build system. Then in Debug mode, build & debug the project. It fails to start the CDB with an error dialog "The CDB process has been terminated". Try to run the built executable in terminal, it complains that "The Application has failed to start because its side to side configuration is incorrect".

qmake is OK: In Qt Creator, create a new Qt Console Application project. This time select qmake as the build system. Then in Debug mode build & debug the project. The program is built successfully and runs well. Running the built executable in terminal goes well too.

I tried to inspect the DLL dependencies with dumpbin. And both the executables depends on these:

Qt5Cored.dll
VCRUNTIME140D.dll
ucrtbased.dll
KERNEL32.dll

Can anyone help me with this problem? Thanks.