How to configure CDB in Qt Creator?

Martin picture Martin · Apr 2, 2012 · Viewed 82.7k times · Source

The question here is the same as mine but the solution there is not working for me. I am using QtCreator 2.4.1 on Windows 7. When i try to debug a simple hello world app the message displayed is: "The preferred debugger engine for debugging binaries of type 'x86-windows-msvc2010-pe-32bit' is not available....Details: There is no CDB binary available for binaries in format 'x86-windows-msvc2010-pe-32bit"

When i found that cdb.exe was not on my system i had Windows SDK installed with debugger tools and the current location of cdb.exe is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Debuggers\x86\cdb.exe" and "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Debuggers\x64\cdb.exe",

In the CDB tab i configured symbol server as well as the path of CDB.exe, but in vain!

QtCreator->Tools->options->Debugger->CDB Tab->has the following fields:
Additional arguments
use CDB console
Symbol Paths
Source Paths
Correct breakpoint location etc...

Can somebody kindly explain in detail what these mean and what values are expected here. Has anybody successfully debugged any applicaiton using Qt Creator.


Please refer this link:
http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/16018/

Answer

Colby Boles picture Colby Boles · Apr 14, 2012

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.