Qt 4.8 with MSVC 2010: ‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command

We have some issues with the Qt 4.7.4 SDK so I figured it out maybe the Qt 4.8 (currently RC) will solve these (mostly Flash related) problems.

The new Qt SDK Maintenance Tool is very handy, some clicks and you’re good to go with any Qt version.

So I downloaded the 4.8 RC and downloaded the Windows SDK 7.1 which (should) contain the Visual Studio 2010 C++ compiler.

I tried a full recompile, even deleted build directories by hand, but I got this annoying error every time I tried to compile the project: ‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command.

I double-checked everything and it seemed to be just fine, but still I got this error. I opened the SDK’s Command Prompt which should set everything to build from command line, but even the Prompt gave me this error. So what’s wrong? What did I miss?

Well, I guess nothing. After hours of trying, recompiling, reinstalling still got the error. Then I found a blog post which made me suspicious: if you have the Visual Studio XXXX and install the Windows SDK after then it won’t install the build tools because it’s already there for the Visual Studio.

I installed Visual Studio 2010 a few month ago for some testing but I uninstalled it right after I finished with the testing. But what if Windows still detects it somehow to be installed…

So as a last chance I installed the Visual C++ 2010 Express, then tried to recompile again… And it worked!

I still cannot believe it. But here it is, for anybody experiencing the same issue.