Question title pretty much asks it all. I know I could set the project to be a .lib build and have it fail to build/link a .lib .... and the .objs tend to be in the appropriate config dir That seems like a shi*-a** backdoor way to get VS to gen objs Is there a flag/param I can set somewhere in the property sheet properties/options for Visual Studio so it links what it needs to & gens the respective objs for each source file? It's so freaking easy to just gen object files using gcc (and link in appropriate lib routines WITHOUT creating an executable) ... I'm sure I could also hack up a custom build rule but that seems like overkill [and since I'm not up to speed on the build rules for whatever version of make VS 2010 is using it's easier to ask someone else here for the simple solution]