Visual Studio

I like programming with Visual Studio but I also like to make my projects open source and available to share. Sometimes though I use third party libraries and I link to them through the project files -- I was just wondering if there were like configure scripts that I could use to setup the project files for includes and libraries since this is basically like the makefiles for windows. On unix systems it's a little easier because 'make install' creates the install in absolute locations but there is nothing like this for windows (right?)

You could base your projects on cmake.

I recently discovered premake | build script generation I thought that you might want to look at it. I found it while choosing an XML library (ended up with TinyXML++)

While I don't disagree that there are FAR better build systems out there, nmake is at least guaranteed to be present on any reasonable VC installation. A few judicious variables here, a batch file there, and the user can type "build" after setting variables appropriately to find the third party libs.

Being dependent on third-party libs is bad enough already (from an ease-of-build standpoint) -- having to install and configure an entire build system just to compile somebody's code base will probably cause me to lose interest in trying.

cmake, premake, nmake -- obviously lots of options lol. I don't think visual studio can even create makefiles to use for nmake so screw that, I think the build format is the project file

I was recently inspired by all these visual studio add-ins -- any of you guys have any favorites? I'm interested in all sorts of features -- except .net -- none of that

There's one add-on I just found that I thought was pretty cool.

It updates VERSIONINFO structures in your resource files

CodeGuru: Increment File and Product Version Number: Multiple IDE

Now I just have to figure out how to read that information from my code

Using Version Information