We have some old C code here that's built with nmake.
Is there an automated way to pull the Makefile into Visual Studio 2005 and create a project? Some searching on MSDN indicates VS6 could do this, but it looks like VS7/8 dropped the feature.
If necessary I can build the project from scratch using the project.mak file as a reference, but for more complex projects this may not be viable.
I have been heavily involved in a project at my company to do the same thing. I found that many of the old nmake based projects of our had many common settings. Because of that, I went the route of creating a custom project wizard.
It took several days of fooling around with it to get right, but has saved a lot of time. It has also allowed us to bring other devs into the effort of re-compiling in a manner that makes it easy for them, yet enforces many of the compiler settings we would like.
With the wizard, the steps of recompiling look much like:
1.) Create project.
2.) Compile and stomp out all errors and warnings.
3.) Add libraries that need to be linked in.
4.) Done.