Thanks tarekmadkour and steixeira for taking the time to answer and providing additional information.

Please note that we really appreciate the quality of your development environment. So much so that we, in fact, go to great lengths to use Dev Studio and VC++ for ALL of our multi-platform cross-developments, including Win32 Console and MFC applications as well as external microcontroller applications.

We will continue using projects of type 'External Makefile' for future developments.

Also we will continue benchmarking the project interfaces and examining options such as those mentioned by orcmid.

Sincerely, Chris.