Yes, this is quite possible. Configuration is nothing but a name for the MSBuild project grouping together the whole set of build options. You can add your own configurations and define the whole set of options for each configurations, predefined or your own. Note that predefined configurations are no different from your own. They do not actually present in the project file standard and may or may not be present. In Visual Studio, they merely appear from the template you used when you create a project from template. You can skip using a template, if you wish, or you can start from the template and remove nearly all from your project after you create it.
To see what you can do, learn to use Visual Studio Configuration Manager (please find it in the menus). Also, it's good to understand how MSBuild projects are organized and used:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171452%28v=vs.90%29.aspx[
^].
Note that inside Visual Studio, you can set any of the available configurations, but also a CPU architecture called in MSBuild and Visual Studio "Platform". These two parameters are passed to build as
properties (you can find then in the reference I referenced above), they are referred as
$(Configuration)
and
$(Plarform)
. Platform can be predefined in the project itself (you can do it in Visual Studio property page) or it may depends on the combination of "Configuration" and "Platform" settings shown on top of Visual Studio. If some of those properties is predefined in the project itself, parameters passed by Studio are ignored.
—SA