How to start Qt development on Windows, but targeting Maemo 5?

Question

Hello Everyone,

I've recently heard about Qt and read about how fun it is to develop with. By the way, I'm also buying a Nokia N900 and I heard that its operating system, Maemo 5, supports Qt quite nicely, so I thought I'll give it a shot.

I'm a .NET developer, so I'd prefer to develop on Windows, and if it is possible, using Visual Studio. I downloaded the latest Qt SDK. I started up the Qt Creator and created a simple "Qt4 Gui Application". It was working fine, however, I couldn't find any options to compile for Maemo 5 anywhere.

Then, I downloaded the Visual Studio plugin and tried to create a "Qt Application" with that, however, no matter which Qt project type I chose, after clicking the OK button, the dialog just kept popping up again, so it couldn't create anything.

I also read about the Maemo 5 SDK, however, it only seems to work on Linux. (Every walkthrough for Windows started with setting up a virtual machine with Linux.) However, I'm not experienced with Linux at all, so I'd prefer to stay on Windows.

So my question is: is it possible to create Qt applications that will run on Maemo 5 while developing on Windows, or this is impossible?

Thank you in advance for any answers.

EDIT (Solution):

Since the time I started this question, a very nice development tool, the Nokia Qt SDK solves this problem very well. It is cross-platform and can be used to develop Symbian and Maemo apps alike. For the Maemo toolchain, it uses MADDE, which is exactly the tool recommended by the answer. (Note that it is no longer a technical preview anymore.)

Here is a very nice introduction video about the Nokia Qt SDK.

Answer 1

I would suggest getting used to Linux; after all, Maemo (or MeeGo, now) is really Linux underneath, and the official SDK is the Linux-based scratchbox.

That being said, there exists an unofficial community project MADDE:

This is a TECHNICAL PREVIEW of a new development tool for Maemo. MADDE stands for Maemo Application Development and Debugging Environment and offers the following features:

• Command-line cross-compiling
• Multi-platform support (Linux (32-bit/64-bit), Windows, Mac OS X)
• Configurable for different targets & toolchains
• Client for the device to simplify the development process
• Simplicity

You are welcome to test the tool in your development process. But keep in mind that this is a technical preview. We highly appreciate your feedback in talk, the developer list and especially in bugzilla (Developer Platform -> MADDE).