Qt – Can not debug using Qt Creator on Windows

After installing Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, I upgraded to Qt Creator 2.4. Now when I debug, it started using x64 cdb! The first couple times were still very slow for some reason. However, when I tried to time it, it's now working at a reasonable speed. Even after re-starting Qt Creator or even rebooting, debugging is now running at a reasonable speed: maybe 2-3 seconds to bring up my main form the first time, and 1 second thereafter. Used to take anywhere from a minute to 20 minutes.

So it's working now! Hope this is helpful to someone.

I was having the same problems too, and finally figured out how to solve this. Styne666 gave me a hint. Do the following:

1. Tools
2. Options...
3. Build & Run
4. Tool Chains
5. Use the "Clone" button to make a copy of each of the auto-detected MSVC items
6. In each of the cloned items, you can specify the debugger in the "Debugger" field (e.g. C:\Program Files\Windows Kits\8.0\Debuggers\x64\cdb.exe)
7. After this everything seems to work...

I should further mention that if you are running a 64-bit version of Windows and a 32-bit version of Qt Creator like I am, you need to make sure that you are pointing to the 32-bit versions of cdb (of which there are x86 and x64 target versions). So for the 32-bit target builds I run this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Debuggers\x86\cdb.exe

And for x64 builds I run this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Debuggers\x64\cdb.exe

The tricky part is that it is somewhat difficult to get Microsoft to install the 32-bit version of the debugging tools on your 64-bit machine. A co-worker tried to do so recently and said that he needed to install the Windows 8 tools in order to have the option to do that - the Windows 7 versions would not let you.