In the next release of the Qt Visual Studio tools scheduled for this summer, the developers plan to add support for Visual Studio Linux projects. Since the introduction of the Linux in C++ workload, users have been able to work on Linux development in Visual Studio. This feature is of potential interest to Qt developers given the cross-platform nature of Qt itself, so there are plans to add support for it in the Qt VS Tools extension.
As far as how cross compilation actually works, when building Linux projects in VS, the build process and overall mix will rely on either MSBuild or CMake, just like traditional Win32 projects. The build tools themselves will run on a compilation server accessible via SSH. For MSBuild projects, Visual Studio allows you to select gcc or clang as the C++ compiler.
The developers' plan to add support for Linux projects is to use the features included in the VS Linux workload to extend existing Qt/MSBuild targets. The main goal is to be able to create and run Qt-enabled MSBuild projects for both Windows and Linux.
As a first step in this direction, and as a proof of concept, the developers manually converted a simple Qt example (wiggly) into an MSBuild project for both Windows and Linux. Pressing F5 will create a project for the selected target and then start a debug session, either locally for a Windows build or via gdbserver in the case of Linux.
This exercise demonstrated that you can use the Visual Studio IDE to develop, build, and even debug multiplatform Qt applications. Therefore, regardless of the target platform, the Qt VS Tools extension should be able to seamlessly assist in setting up and using the Qt tools in MSBuild projects. It also became clear that the changes to Qt/MSBuild targets needed to support both native and cross-platform builds would mostly focus on the way Qt tools are invoked. Most (if not all) of the logic that powers Qt's integration with MSBuild will remain valid for Linux.
This article covered the case where VS is being used to target a Linux host. However, given that the VS Linux workload only requires the GNU SSH-accessible toolkit, it is possible to use the cross-compiler toolkit instead of the main one. It should probably be possible to use VS as an alternative IDE for development with Qt for MCU.
