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I am just starting to learn how to use Qt in C++. They have a option to use a standalone Qt creator as well as an addon for Visual Studio. I have Visual Studio Community 2015.

The question is, is there any disadvantages of using the addon for Visual Studio over just coding in Qt creator?

tommyip
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  • IMO Visual Studio for C++ simply sucks (for C# it is great). It is slow and overloaded with useless features (useless when using Qt). For me Qt Creator is much more handy for C++ projects even if they are not using Qt framework. – Marek R Feb 22 '16 at 22:24
  • Thanks, I have a weird problem in Qt where there is a slight input lag from the keyboard inside the Qt editor. Is this common? – tommyip Feb 22 '16 at 22:26
  • No. I never had such problem. – Marek R Feb 22 '16 at 22:26

1 Answers1

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UPDATE: How do i use Qt in my Visual Studio 2015 projects?

It seems the below is a bit outdated already considering using Qt extension for VS2015. But I have not personally tried myself yet and suspect Qt Creator still have its advantage as below.

The advantages of Qt Visual Studio Add-In:

  • It lets us to use better debugger from Visual Studio while working with Qt project
  • It lets us to easily do the remote debugging by running the executable on other system or VM
  • Many developers used to Visual Studio

The disadvantages of Qt Visual Studio Add-In:

  • Very unreliable project import, makes us to fix things manually. And not all add-in versions are good: we still use 1.2.3 because of that
  • Not convenient with adding file to the project etc. We usually add to and then re-import the project from Qt .pro file
  • Visual Studio builds the code much slower than Qt Creator does (roughly the proportion between nmake and jom tools, jom parallelizes the build)
  • Visual Studio must be higher than Express (e.g. Ultimate)

The Qt Visual Studio Add-in allows programmers to create, build, debug and run Qt applications from within non-Express versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, 2010, and 2012 (*newer versions also covered).

The rest of advantages and disadvantages can be considered individual developer preferences. I like Qt Creator for its ability to quickly find any definition under the cursor (press Ctrl and hover the mouse cursor and select) while MS Visual Studio does that but not as easy and surprisingly too frequently fails to find the definition (they fix it for years and maintain huge index files for the source code while Qt Creator does not build such files).

And for me the main disadvantage of Qt Creator is CDB from Windows SDK or maybe another external one vs. way better debugger in Visual Studio including remote. So I debug complex issues with Visual Studio but I write the code and quickly test it with Qt Creator.

Community
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Alexander V
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