Qt Creator's Integrated Development Environment contains an editor and tools to start the compiler, linker, and debugger in order to build and debug your applications. Using this, you can start and stop your application, place breakpoints while your application is stopped, or examine the variables or the logical flow of your application.

While Qt Creator manages most of the project for you, sometimes you just have to get down and dirty with a .pro file. You can use scopes to handle conditional compilation (things such as when building for a specific platform or whether a file should be included in the Release or Debug mode). The .pro file consists of scopes, variables, and their values; by setting the variables that the .pro file feeds qmake, qmake understands the dependencies in your project and magically creates a make file to build your application.

In the next chapter, we'll move on from the mechanics of making a project build and take a look at Qt Creator's UI designer as well...