You can leave the Output (for debugging) field alone if you've named your executable after the project name and it lands where Visual Studio expects to find it. In the Visual C++ section, select Makefile Project Start Visual Studio and say File > New Project. I expect you'd quickly gather a big user base. On the plus side, if you were looking to start an open source project, this sounds like a good one to me. You'll run into trouble if you try to mix the VC++ and g++ compilers for a single executable built from multiple modules. cpp, probably) that Visual C++ already knows about. You then have to manually adjust each project to tell it to use the custom build tool instead of the default, since you're using a file name extension (. You'd have to have a compelling reason to take this project on. And, doing it yourself requires writing COM code, which is probably too deep a pool to dive into just for a single project. So far as I know, no one has done this yet for GCC. They tell the IDE how to transform files of one form (e.g. Visual Studio 2005 and newer will let you register custom build tools. There are several ways to go here: Option 1: Create a Custom Build Tool

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