Visual Studio recompiles "moc" files every time when running qmake

Question

I'm having a quite large project which is developed in C/CPP with Qt. Every time i change a setting in the .pri or .pro file i have to convert the project with qmake.

I do this with:

qmake -spec win32-msvc2012 -tp vc $projectName.pro

after that i reload the project in Visual Studio (2012).

When i build the project every time ALL "moc" files are regenerated and the whole project compiles / rebuilds completely. Is there a method to just recompile the changed/new included files?

Answer 1

You should use the Visual Studio Add-In for Qt 5. There is one for Qt 4 as well, albeit the older version of that (1.1.11) does not support VS 2012. You can find the latest blog post about this in here:

http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/04/11/visual-studio-add-in-1-2-1-for-qt-5-released/

Among other things, you will get a lot more features than just what you write here. See this change log for the latest release:

The Qt Visual Studio Add-In version 1.2.1 contains multiple bugfixes and improvements.

Changes
-------
- Qt 5.0.1 help documents included
- Qmake wrapper COM component removed and replaced with command line tool
  qmakefilereader to avoid need to load Qt5 library binaries to Visual Studio
  process. And to get installation of add-in easier, specially with VS2008.
- Qt4 add-in is not allowed to run same time, if found it will be closed.
  Also if Qt4 add-in is present in system, default editor values for .ts, .ui
  and .qrc file types are not permanently overwritten by Qt5 add-in. Values are
  written when Qt5 add-in loads and Qt4 values are set when Qt5 add-in unloads.
  This should make it possible to install and use both Qt4 and Qt5 versions of
  add-in. Not to use same time but in turns. Though user must be careful what he
  does.
- Recognizing Qt5 CE build. (QTVSADDINBUG-153)
- Incorrect additional directories paths set when Qt modules added/removed from
  Qt Project Settings page. (QTVSADDINBUG-151)
- Include directories search path for some Qt modules fixed (QTVSADDINBUG-150)
- Invalid Qt module names fixed (QTVSADDINBUG-142)
- Crash when importing .pri file fixed (QTVSADDINBUG-139)
- Qt default settings saving problem fixed (QTVSADDINBUG-137)
- Naming of precompiled header fixed (QTVSADDINBUG-132)
- Support for debugger visualizers in VS2012 (QTVSADDINBUG-129)
- Setting Qt libraries path for debugging session fixed (QTVSADDINBUG-125)