Building Qt5 with Visual Studio 2012 / Visual Studio 2013, and integrating with the IDE

Question

How do you get Qt5 to download and integrate with Visual Studio 2012? What are some of the problems you will encounter, and how do you solve those problems?

Answer 1

I was finally able to compile QT 5.1 (git) with QWebKit on Windows 8 x64 using Visual Studio 2012 and figured I'd share my experience with those that had problems as well.

Did step 1 and 2 as stated in the above post. I tried to do step 3 but SmartGit pulled a bunch of extra projects that wouldn't compile with Qt5. I was able to solve most of the problems by cloning from a different fork (e.g. https://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt3d/), but this became too tedious to do for every extra module, so I decided against compiling any of them.

The post at ICU support in a 32-bit build of Qt5 with the VS2012 compiler causes Qt5 build failure; Webkit is also therefore unbuildable told me how to fix the ICU problem.

Download the source code at http://download.icu-project.org/files/icu4c/51.2/icu4c-51_2-src.zip and add the line

#define U_CHARSET_IS_UTF8 1

to the file %ICU%\source\common\unicode\platform.h , where %ICU% is the path to the ICU source code.

Open %ICU%\source\allinone\allinone.sln file in Visual Studio 2012 and compile. Add %ICU%\bin to your path

set PATH=%ICU%\bin64;%PATH%

Then I ran the following command in the QT root directory

configure -platform win32-msvc2012 -opengl desktop -opensource -debug-and-release -I %ICU%\include -L %ICU%\icu\lib64 -mp -qt-freetype -icu

At this point I started to suspect that no one tried to do what I was doing, because nmake started to complain about unexpected lines in the makefiles (all of which had the extension DerivedSources, e.g. Makefile.JavaScriptCore.DerivedSources and Makefile.WebCore.DerivedSources))

(set PATH=;%PATH%) && ....

do the set PATH manually before running nmake and delete the characters up to and including && e.g.

 (set PATH=;%PATH%) && perl -ne "print $1" css\CSSPropertyNames.in ...

Becomes

perl -ne "print $1" css\CSSPropertyNames.in ...

Finally, one of these files will try to call win_flex.exe (or win-flex.exe) instead of flex. I changed it to flex.exe and everything finally compiled (Had to change it twice, because I think the file got regenerated).

Brief experience with a program that uses QWebKit and linked against this build leads me to believe everything is fine.

--Update--

Just to be complete. According to What does (set PATH=...;%PATH:)=^)%) mean in a Windows shell script, and how can I overcome failure of this line in the context of a Qt5 nmake build? (which points to http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/20605) most of the Makefile problems should be solvable by using jsom instead of nmake (although I still wonder about win-flex.exe)