ArcGIS Runtime SDK post-install steps for Visual Studio 2019

[NothernCoder]

Good day, I see that the ArcGIS for QT page has instructions for using QT Creator https://developers.arcgis.com/qt/get-started/

Are there steps for setting up for Visual Studio 2019 after you install the ArcGIS SDK?

Thanks again.

[JamesBallard1]

Hi @NothernCoder, are you running into any specific issues? Typically on Windows, assuming you have Visual Studio 2019 installed, installing Qt and using Qt Creator that is installed along with Qt will auto-configure the kits for you.

Generally, the workflow should go something like this (the order isn't mandatory)

• Install Visual Studio 2019 latest version.
• Install Qt 5.15.2 (or latest 5.15.X).
• Install ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt.

After that, when you launch Qt Creator (the one included with Qt install), you should be ready to start writing some code. Our post installer at the end of our installation will optionally include Qt Creator templates to get you started, if you choose to install them (it's optional).

[NothernCoder]

Hi @JamesBallard1, I'm trying to use the newly installed ArcGIS Runtime SDK QT in Visual Studio but don't see any steps to go about doing this. I like to code in Visual Studio myself and the official page only shows configuring QT Creator.

[JamesBallard1 · Accepted solution]

@NothernCoder thanks for clarifying. There is a visual studio 2019 plugin you can use to use Qt with the VS IDE, but we've not tested with that. There is a lot of extra stuff Qt does and Visual Studio typically doesn't know about it (like moc, for example).

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TheQtCompany.QtVisualStudioTools2019 

Our team mostly uses Qt Creator since it provides the best cross-platform development experience across macOS, Linux and Windows, but it is subjective. Another option would be to configure your build with qmake on the command line, or even with CMake and then use VS Code as your editor. It should work, but we've not tested that either.

[NothernCoder]

Thank you, I'll take a look at pointing the new ArcGIS Runtime SDK QT install in Visual Studio.

[Jan-Tschada]

Our developers prefer to use Visual Studio 2019/2022 environments, too. We switched using CMake for our implementation projects as @JamesBallard1 suggested. I know CMake is a different beast - especially when it comes to caching and multiple configurations - but migrating to the new version 200.x being based on Qt6 worked like a charm for our projects. We still see some issues with CMake and caching in the VS environments in more complex scenarios like compiling the Qt Maps SDK using vcpkg e.g. with pybind11 into a core foundational Python module, because our data engineers love to use Maps SDK functionality in their Python environments. So that, we setup a new project or solving issues for existing projects using Qt Creator with CMake and then switch back to Visual Studio.

Here is some neat tutorial from Microsoft:

CMake projects using VS 2019