Good techniques to use Makefiles in VisualStudio?

Question

I know the ideal way to build projects is without requiring IDE based project files, since it theoretically causes all sort of trouble with automation and what not. But I\'v

Answer 1

Ideally perhaps, in practice no.

Makefiles would be my preference as the build master, however, the developers spend all their time inside the visual studio IDE and when they make a change, it's to the vcproj file, not the makefile. So if I'm doing the global builds with makefiles, it's too easily put out of synch with the project/solution files in play by 8 or 10 others.

The only way I can stay in step with the whole team is to run devenv.exe on the solution files directly in my build process scripts.

There are very few makefiles in my builds, where there are they are in the pre-build or custom build sections or a separate utility project.