How do you make Qt Quick applications in Visual Studio?

Question

I'm trying to learn Qt and I'm still somewhat new to programming in general, and I prefer to do my coding in VS (2015), since that's what I know, but I can't figure out how to make Qt Quick applications. I've installed the VS Tools plugin for Qt, but it doesn't have an option in the setup wizard for a QML project, only a widgets project, and that's about the extent of my knowledge of how to set something like that up. I've been googling for most of the day to try to figure out how to do it, and I've found plenty of examples of people using Quick projects in VS without problem, but no examples of how to actually set it up to begin with. What do I need to do?

Answer 1

The following answer is intended for VS 2019 with Qt 5.13.1 and Qt Creator 4.10. If that differs from what you are working with, I hope the instructions are similar enough.

1. Open up QT Creator, select "File" > "New File or Project", then choose any of the templates with "Qt Quick Application" in their title.
2. Go through the rest of the setup dialog. The default options for rest of the steps should work fine. Create your project.
3. In Qt Creator, in the lower left corner, click the button that says "Unconfigured", then click the text that allows you to configure it in projects mode. This will bring up a dialog. Click "Configure Project". Wait for your project to generate. This will "fill out" your project, and give you the basic files for your template.
4. Open up Visual Studio. Go to the editor without selecting a project or folder. For VS 2019, there is a small link on the bottom right side of the screen that says "Continue without code" that allows you to do this.
5. Find the menu for your Qt VS Tools extension. For VS 2019, you will simply click "Extensions" > "Qt VS Tools". For VS 2015 and 2017, I'm not sure where it is, but it's probably in "Tools" somewhere.
6. Click "Open Qt Project File" or similar. Find the .pro file generated by Qt Creator and open it.
7. Visual studio will now generate your new solution and project. It should build and run out of the box, and you shouldn't have to mess with your .vcxproj or .pro files.

Source: How to convert QtCreator project to Visual Studio project