I have a Qt GUI application running on Windows that allows command-line options to be passed and under some circumstances I want to output a message to the console and then
First of all, why would you need to output to console in a release mode build? Nobody will think to look there when there's a gui...
Second, qDebug is fancy :)
Third, you can try adding console to your .pro's CONFIG, it might work.
console
.pro
CONFIG