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How hard would it be to create stub apps that really just call out to clang/llvm?

Not hard. But how hard would it be to make large existing codebases which have always been built by VC++ compile against them? Very. Let alone the institutional aversion to admitting their competitors have done something better than them...

Personally I've wanted a project type without a "compile" in VS for a while... mainly for other environments that serve as a client/service for the VS stuff... I often use a "website" project and uncheck it from "build" but that's not quite what is needed.

Mainly, as an example, I want to be able to have my NodeJS webservice project in the same solution as my MVC website project, and the C# dll client project. The NodeJS solution doesn't need all the assembly folders, or a .Net compile... but it does need the configured prebuild step, that's it. People say to use a "Website" project, but that brings my entire node_modules tree into source control. It's a pain.

Maybe you could try the Makefile Project for this : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txcwa2xx(v=vs.110).a... You get to decide what happens on build events as far as I remember.

Perhaps you could create a custom target that overrides the compile\build targets and simply does nothing?

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