VisualGDB uses a tool-created makefile for cross-compiling and building. Not a lot of room for me to innovate. I suppose the .o trick could work. But it still requires careful hand-scripted builds. I already have that - I run a script to read a binary file and emit .c declaration, which I pipe to a C file and include in the project.

I suppose it lets me drop support of the script, which is something.