Visual Studio custom build definitions for CLI built embedded C++ - c++

Question

I have a build engine from ARM, called yotta. I have been working with the command line, where with the following commands, I can build projects and produce outputs.
$ yt target bbc-microbit-gcc
$ yt build
The compiled file is then accessible from build/bbc-microbit-gcc/source/Project-name-combined.hex
Is it possible to automate this CLI and build it into Visual Studio as a build definition? I know in Visual Studio Team Services / Team Foundation Server), you can define build steps using the command line, what is the local equivalent.
I am using Visual Studio Enterprise 2015. Any nudge in the right direction would be much appreciated.
EDIT:
I have seen the GCC4mbed project, but it would be good to use the new yotta command line build to do this. As far as VS is concerned is a command line tool which adds a built version of the project to a directory, a build tool? If so, then I know I can just follow the guides to add a custom build tool to VS however, it strikes me that VS might need a build tool to be in a certain standard to make intellisense etc work. In which case I might need to create a build tool on top of the existing yotta work and specify this to VS? Ideas would be muuch appreciated.

Answer 1

did you try to use cmake generators option which yotta provides (as it uses CMake)?
yotta build --help
-G CMAKE_GENERATOR, --cmake-generator CMAKE_GENERATOR
CMake generator to use (defaults to Ninja). You can use this to generate IDE project files instead, see cmake --help
The ideal solution which implemented partially as VS debug engine is still under development, just recently allowed gdb extensions. The tool on top of yotta for debugging is called Valinor (which is using progen: https://github.com/project-generator/project_generator).
Progen supports visual studio gdb (its very limited at the moment as explained later). I was able to use yotta debug with visual studio, but not without hacks (dated back in November-December 2015). The idea was to have a visual studio project with gdb setup and custom build commands (make,cmake or yotta) (in our case would be pyOCD settings, could be openOCD or jlinkGDB, and built environment for yotta).
As I recall, you commented on the issue on https://github.com/project-generator/project_generator/issues/98, and I haven't heard back from you. The problems I had I recall was I could not start gdb server (I had to do it manually), I could not make it to pass arguments to gdb (like load/reset/halt when starting the session).
I'll update my VS plugins and check if there were any updates in gdb plugins, I was told there should be.
I appreciate any help, either for progen or valinor to make this available for users.