I have a build process for a large enterprise system comprising several dozen separate EXEs and DLLs. These use multiple languages, C, C++, Fortran, Python, Awk and a couple more. The build scripts are 4DOS batch processes which evolved over 4 decades. They are large and unwieldy and need constant care and feeding.

I must keep the Visual Studio solution and project files as the basic compile/link entities. What's the best tool for wrapping these disparate languages all together. 4DOS is very old and cumbersome.

EDIT:

Thanks gang. I think I'll try SCONS first because it's Python. We have plenty of people well versed in Python to be able to update and maintain it. I'm 61 now and it's not going to be me supporting this in the long term. I don't like anything requiring JAVA or XML because those are not languages already in our product mix and we have enough in play. 

Those blog posts were good. He concluded that SCONS was best but simply too slow for his purposes. I'm not looking for speed in nightly builds. It's got until 7 AM. I want readability and maintainability.