Even though it is more nice to open generated Visual Studio solutions directly I like the native CMake integration of Visual Studio 2017 very much and get more and more used to it. There is cool stuff going on and nice features are promised for the future: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/11/16/cmake-support-in-visual-studio-the-visual-studio-2017-rc-update https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2017/05/10/cmake-support-in-visual-studio-whats-new-in-2017-15-3-update Unfortunately, the bundled Version of CMake is quite outdated and new features like C# support etc. are missing. Are there any plans (from Microsoft/Kitware/...) to merge the **cmake-daemon** branch to master? I found the Visual Studio branch here: https://github.com/Microsoft/CMake/tree/cmake-daemon This would be very nice, because new features could directly be used in Visual Studio without having to merge manually or wait for updates from Microsoft. Furthermore new official CMake releases could also be used by those who are not developing/compiling CMake themselves.