1.2 Windows notes

Here are some notes for building Fritzing with Microsoft Visual Studio and Qt under Windows. Note that we recommend to use Qt Creator instead, as it is much easier to set up.

Software Versions

Fritzing needs at least Qt5.6, and will require Qt >= 5.9 in the near future.

It is recommended that you use Windows 10, 64 Bit, as this is included in automated builds. Building Fritzing for other versions of Windows is for the adventurous.

Don't ask about Windows XP, please. Microsoft will stop providing security updates for Windows 7 in January 2020.

Build Qt from source

To run Qt with Microsoft Visual Studio, you will have to rebuild Qt from source. These instructions are known to work with VS Express 2008 (and previously, with minor changes, with MSVC 2005), so they may vary from other versions.

1. Download the Qt source distribution for Windows. That will be a zip file named something like ... qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.0.zip. Unzip it someplace.

2. Either open the command window from MSVC, or alternatively directly open a new command window and run vsvars32.bat (found somewhere like C:\Program Files\Microsoft VisualStudio 9.0\Common7\Tools\vsvars32.bat).

3. On the command line, cd to the unzipped Qt directory, for example cd c:\Qt\qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.0

4. Now run configure in the command line (depending on your pc, this can take an hour)

   configure -debug-and-release -opensource -plugin-sql-sqlite -no-qt3support -platform win32-msvc2008 -qt-zlib -qt-libpng -qt-libtiff -qt-libjpeg -no-mmx -no-3dnow -no-sse -no-dbus

5. Run nmake when that finishes (depending on your machine, this can take anywhere from 4 to 24 hours). Now you've built Qt. If you need to change parameters or you need to start again, do steps 1 and 2 again, then run nmake confclean, then continue with step 3.

Boost

It should be sufficient to download a recent version (boost 1.70 or later). Using boost 1.54 will lead to application crashes later on. Note that Fritzing currently only uses boost headers, so you don't need to compile the boost libraries.

Build Fritzing

Once you've built Qt, and downloaded the fritzing source, it will be necessary to convert from a Qt project (a .pro file) to a MSVC project.

To do the conversion, open a command window and cd to the folder where you keep the fritzing project files (the folder that contains the "phoenix.pro" project).

Then run qmake (a tool provided by Qt), for example:

C:\Qt\qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.0\bin\qmake.exe -t vcapp phoenix.pro

This will create a file called fritzing.vcproj that you can open with Visual Studio.