BTW, in earlier versions of Visual Studio (definitely VC++ 6, but maybe later) it was possible to add an arbitrary custom compilation step for a file, that worked just fine – no need to modify projects and the like. They removed this capability in favor of “custom tools” that, in my opinion, is inferior: you no longer can use simple text transformation command-line utilities “as is”, you need some COM-bloated integration layer around them, to make them either MSBuild tasks, or custom tools, or add-ins, or whatever.