I didn’t know this until just recently, but a version of Trolltech’s QT for Windows exists without having to purchase a license. After doing programming with KDE and QT in a Linux environment and now switching back to working with Windows, I’ve often thought about how nice it would be to use QT under Windows - but I’ve always thought that you have to buy it. While buying it is not a bad idea, if you’re doing something as a hobby or don’t intend to sell your idea it’s probably not an option. Using QT can enable you to easily write cross-platform applications that will work in at least Linux and Windows, and probably other Unices and OSX as well.

One place to find the GPL’d version of QT for Windows is at the Vienna University of Technology. There are probably other places that host it as well. The executable pretty much does everything automatically, and the “INSTALL” file will get you going in no-time. You’ll be using Trolltech’s “Designer” with your C++ IDE (I am using VC++ 6) for writing applications in minutes!

I also was able to easily get the QWT plotting widgets to compile and integrated with QT designer, which means that I should be able to compile code with QT depends in Linux and on my Windows install (in VMWare, that is). Neat!