Getting Started : Premake

Visual Studio is a common IDE to work with, but constantly adding library dependencies can create conflicts and has not been very helpful for keeping things organized. Premake is a useful tool for generating solution and project files with the necessary dependencies. This is the method I learned, but may by no means be the best method depending on the size of complexity of project.

I have a single line batch file that creates the solution by calling Premake4.exe with a lua-script file argument. 

//CreateSolution.bat

..\..\premake\Premake4 --file=ScriptFile.lua --platform=x32 vs2008

and the associated script file contains the information for the solution as well as the project.

//ScriptFile.lua

solution "MySolution"

   configurations { "Debug" }

project "MyProject"

   kind "ConsoleApp"

   language "C++"

   local sampleSDK = 'C:/Users/Alex/Documents/sampleSDK'

   files {"**.h", "**.cpp" }

   includedirs { "include" }

   links { sampleSDK .. '/lib/sample' }

    configuration "Debug"

      flags { "Symbols" }

      defines { "WIN32", "_DEBUG" }

This is the basic structure if you are only creating one project for this solution and all the files are located in immediate subfolders. Alternatively you could create a Solution lua script file, and corresponding Project scripts that would look something like this:

//SolutionFile.lua

solution "MySolution"

   configurations { "Debug" }

   dofile('./Project0/Project0-premake.lua')

   dofile('./Project1/Project1-premake.lua')

//Project0-premake.lua

project "MyProject0"

   kind "ConsoleApp"

   language "C++"

.

.

.

In this way you can continue to use **.h and **.cpp because  all the files are in their corresponding folders. Otherwise you would have to specify which files to include in each project, which is not very practical for anything larger than a couple files. 

This is just how I'm currently doing things with my current setup, other minor tweaking for your particular setup should be evident.