We do most of our Windows development on Windows XP, using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 (both the 32- and 64-bit versions).
Qt works with the Standard Edition, the Professional Edition and Team System Edition of Visual Studio 2005.
We also test Qt 4 on Windows XP with Visual Studio .NET and Visual Studio 2003.
In order to use Qt with the Visual Studio 2005/2008 Express Edition you need to download and install the platform SDK. Due to limitations in the Express Edition it is not possible for us to install the Qt Visual Studio Integration. You will need to use our command line tools to build Qt applications with this edition.
The Visual C++ Linker doesn't understand filenames with spaces (as in C:\Program files\Qt\) so you will have to move it to another place, or explicitly set the path yourself; for example:
QTDIR=C:\Progra~1\Qt
If you are experiencing strange problems with using special flags that modify the alignment of structure and union members (such as /Zp2) then you will need to recompile Qt with the flags set for the application as well.
If you're using Visual Studio .NET (2002) Standard Edition, you should be using the Qt binary package provided, and not the source package. As the Standard Edition does not optimize compiled code, your compiled version of Qt would perform suboptimally with respect to speed.
With Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 a bug was introduced which causes Qt not to compile, this has been fixed with a hotfix available from Microsoft. See this Knowledge Base entry for more information.
