Hey all. I was wondering how one might go about building a batch file through the visual studio IDE, similar to how Casey does things. I like the VS 2017 IDE for the plugins and such and it would be simpler to just have the debugger in the same environment as my text editor. So is there a way to just use visual studio as my text editor and debugger and have it just call out to a build.bat file when building? I ask because compilers come built-in with VS 2017 on install and things are usually just configured through it's awful menus. Would rather just work with the batch file.

One way (the simplest) is to create Tools -> External Tool menu item to call build bat. After than you simply edit files as normal in VS. Note that intellisense will probably freak out and not work because there is not project set up, so it does not know about your defines or compiler options.

Another option is create VS makefile project, and set "build.bat" as make command. Then running "do build", "run debugger" keyboard shortcuts will work as usual. But same issues with intellisense.

Alright thanks. That sucks about intellisense though. I think it's come a long way and it seems to work pretty well for code completion and the like.