If you want to reliably maintain (or even build) a given version of the code, it's the right thing to check in the versions of the compilers and build tools tha

If you want to reliably maintain (or even build) a given version of the code, it's the right thing to check in the versions of the compilers and build tools that are known to work. A good tool is small, fast, meant to be run non-interactively, and takes instructions in an easily-reviewed file. Making your official build in Visual Studio is a bad idea for all these reasons--even Microsoft doesn't do that, at least when I contracted there. (They used a make clone with some extra support for metadata from win32 binaries.)