Special notes for MSVC on Windows

Here are some notes for using Microsoft Visual Studio and Qt under windows:

Build Qt

To run Qt with Microsoft Visual Studio, you will have to rebuild Qt from source. These instructions are known to work with VS Express 2008 (and previously, with minor changes, with MSVC 2005), so they may vary from other versions.

1. Download the Qt source distribution for Windows.  That will be a zip file named something like ... qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.0.zip.  Unzip it someplace
2. Either open the command window from MSVC, or alternatively: 
   • directly open a new command window  and run vsvars32.bat (found somewhere like "C:\Program Files\Microsoft VisualStudio 9.0\Common7\Tools\vsvars32.bat").
3. On the command line, cd to the unzipped Qt directory, for example "cd c:\Qt\qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.0"
4. Now run configure in the command line (depending on your pc, this can take an hour) 
   • configure -debug-and-release -opensource -plugin-sql-sqlite -no-qt3support -platform win32-msvc2008 -qt-zlib -qt-libpng -qt-libtiff -qt-libjpeg -no-mmx -no-3dnow -no-sse -no-dbus
5. Run nmake when that finishes (depending on your machine, this can take anywhere from 4 to 24 hours).

Now you've built Qt.  If you need to change parameters or you need to start again, do steps 1 and 2 again, then run "nmake confclean", then continue with step 3.

Build Fritzing

Once you've built qt, and downloaded the fritzing source, it will be necessary to convert from a Qt project (a .pro file) to a MSVC project.  To do the conversion, open a command window and cd to the folder where you keep the fritzing project files (the folder that contains the "phoenix.pro" project).  For example:

cd C:\fritzing

Then run qmake (a tool provided by Qt), for example:

C:\Qt\qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.0\bin\qmake.exe -t vcapp phoenix.pro

This will create a file called fritzing.vcproj that you can open with Visual Studio.