Starting with Visual Studio 2002, there is no longer a way to export your VC++ project files to a Makefile. (That option existed up until VC++ 6.0 but was removed.)
As of VS 2010, the build process for VC++ projects is the same as any other projects: there is a solution file and a set of project files, both of which are recognized by MSBuild as inputs. MSBuild take care of the dependency resolution, build ordering, etc.
The only significant feature that you lose building inside the IDE is parallel builds. If that's your concern, you can run the msbuild
command on your solution file and pass in the /m
parameter to specify how many simultaneous builds it should attempt.
As far as I know, no one has built any kind of tool or plug-in to parse the .vcxproj
files and spit out a makefile, though the file format is pretty well documented XML, so you could always write one yourself. Otherwise, if you really need makefiles for some reason, you'll have to craft them by hand.