Which Qt to download?

Question

I am new to C++ and have been working with MS VISUAL STUDIO 2010 Express. However, I am in need to shift to Qt as my university recommends. Unfortunately, the qt.nokia.com is redirecting to another site http://qt.digia.com/.

Since everything in that site is not free, I found the following link called "Qt Open Source Version". Is this is the site to download Qt?

When I go there, I can see various options, which means number of downloads. I have windows 7 ultimate and got visual studio 2010 express installed in my machine. But, this site got number of windows downloads. I prefer the one which claims to come with the Qt IDE (Qt Creator??). If you need further more information, I will be using this Qt GUI C++ applications with OpenCV.

I have already installed OpenCV and it works with VS so if you can, please tell me how to set it up with Qt as well.

Please help me to download the correct version of Qt. Thanks

Answer 1

Answering to these kind of question is always hard and dangerous!

I know you had experiences with VS but I'm going to offer you to choose MinGW instead.

Download link

Answer 2

qt-project is the correct place to get open source Qt.

There are prebuilt binaries of Qt 5.0 for VS2012, but if you want to use Qt 4.8 with VS2012 you'll need to compile it yourself, as there are no prebuilt binaries for VS2012 (yet?). Compiling Qt is not difficult, just open command prompt for VS2012, run configure --help to find out how you can customize your Qt build. Then run configure with appropriate parameters, then nmake.

If you decide to use Qt Creator as an IDE you are welcome to do it - Qt Creator can compile projects using different compilers, including VS2012 compiler. But in order to debug projects compiled with VS2012 compiler you'll either need to use VS2012 or install Debugging Tools for Windows (which Qt Creator will find and use to debug VS2012-generated executables).