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

We have a program that parses the vcproj files and generates makefile fragments from that. (These include the list of files and the #defines, and there is some limited support for custom build steps.) These fragments are then included by a master makefile which does the usual GNU make stuff.

(This is all for one of the systems we target; its tools have no native support for Visual Studio.)

This didn't require a huge amount of work. A day to set it up, then maybe a day or two in total to beat out some problems that weren't obvious immediately. And it works fairly well: the compiler settings are controlled by the master makefile (no more fiddling with those tiny text boxes), and yet anybody can add new files and defines to the build in the usual way.

That said, the combinatorical problems inherent to Visual Studio's treatment of build configurations remain.