I call standard makefiles as a pre-build or post-build task in Visual Studio. The pre-build task even generates some source files that are subsequently used in the build.
Just make sure you have make.exe in you PATH and maybe defer the call to a batch file if it is too complex for VS. Or use the batch file to set up the PATH altogether.
Pre-build tasks wouldn't cut it, IIRC. The issue was that compiling the project required compiling part of it (part a), then generating source based on the results of (a), then building that generated source (which required the presence of the compiled results from (a), then compiling the rest of the project (b).
Unless I'm grossly misremembering, pre-build tasks would only have worked if the project had been broken up into separate projects such that the generation script could run post-(a) or pre-(b).
Just make sure you have make.exe in you PATH and maybe defer the call to a batch file if it is too complex for VS. Or use the batch file to set up the PATH altogether.