For those of us who want to work on Visual Studio project files:

A guide to .vcxproj and .props file structure. This is a 6-year old post, but the solution and project file formats haven’t changed substantially since then.

Hand-constructing Visual Studio 2012 vcxproj. An older post where I talked about minimum required elements in a vcxproj.

VISUAL STUDIO 2012 SOLUTION FILE GRAMMAR. A stab at a Visual Studio solution grammar.

Build System Changes

MSBuild (Visual C++). Since MSBuild is used to drive builds via .vcxproj files, knowing MSBuild can help you understand the items in a .vcxproj file.

MSBuild Project File Schema Reference

Project Files

Working with both VS 2010 and 2008 on the team

Sharing project properties in Visual C++

Getting Visual Studio version of a Solution file

Question about Visual Studio *.sln file format. An explanation for why the files are so messed up.

Solution (.Sln) File

What does the “Link Library Dependency” linker option actually do in Visual Studio 2010?

Premake5 alpha6 issue - ProjectReference’s in vcxproj have disappeared

dependson can break links in VS

MSVC++ 14.0 _MSC_VER == 1900 (Visual Studio 2015)
MSVC++ 12.0 _MSC_VER == 1800 (Visual Studio 2013)
MSVC++ 11.0 _MSC_VER == 1700 (Visual Studio 2012)
MSVC++ 10.0 _MSC_VER == 1600 (Visual Studio 2010)
MSVC++ 9.0  _MSC_VER == 1500 (Visual Studio 2008)
MSVC++ 8.0  _MSC_VER == 1400 (Visual Studio 2005)
MSVC++ 7.1  _MSC_VER == 1310 (Visual Studio 2003)
MSVC++ 7.0  _MSC_VER == 1300
MSVC++ 6.0  _MSC_VER == 1200
MSVC++ 5.0  _MSC_VER == 1100