"ccbuild is a C++ source scanning build utility for code distributed over directories. Like a dynamic Makefile, ccbuild finds all programs in the current directory (containing "int main") and builds them. For this, it reads the C++ sources and looks at all local and global includes. All C++ source files in the same directories of the local includes are considered objects for the main program. The global includes lead to extra compiler arguments using a configuration file. Next to running g++ it can create simple Makefiles, A-A-P files, and graph dependencies using DOT (Graphviz) graphs."

The code should be an example of how to parse a file.

Here are some links:
A slide show that is a good beginning:
http://nwalsh.com/docs/tutorials/xsl/xsl/slides.html
The wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT

XML/XSL are important to be able to receive and send information.

Here is a way to transform a Microsoft Developers Studio project: (remove te spaces betwwen the <

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform' version='1.0'>
<xsl:variable name="newline">&#xA;< /xsl:variable>
<xsl:output method="text"/>
<xsl:strip-space elements="*" />
<xsl:template match="VisualStudioProject">
<xsl:value-of select="@Name" />
<xsl:text>&#xA;< /xsl:text>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="Configurations/Configuration">
<xsl:value-of select="@Name"/>

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/SimpleSwitchFramework.aspx is an example of making a custom switch for devenv. I really need to get to know msbuild.

http://flourish.org/cinclude2dot/ is a web site that hosts a perl script to create a dependency chart for C++ code.

http://code.google.com/p/sln2scons/source/checkout is supposedly a project that will take a perfectly good sln file and convert to one scons can use. Scons can be found here: http://www.scons.org/