One of the big benefits of using Gradle to build with Visual Studio is that you don’t need to configure your environment for the tool chain. With Gradle, you can build using Visual Studio simply by having it available on the PATH (cl.exe+rc.exe), installed into a standard location, or explicitly configured. It’s even possible to build with multiple versions of Visual Studio (2010/2012 and soon 2013) in the same invocation of Gradle. You should try it out!