After making changes to the Introjucer project, there is no way to manually save the project specific IDE files without also launching the development environment. On Windows, this causes another instance of Visual Studio to open if it was already open previously, causing all sorts of havok.
If you just save the project from the Introjucer (cmd/ctrl + s) all the auto-generated files will be regenerated from scratch, including the IDE files. I use this all the time on the Mac, Xcode 4 just automatically reloads the project which you can normally tell because it annoyingly collapses the project tree. If I remember correctly Visual Studio should ask if you want to reload the project?
Now that’s a lot better than exiting and relaunching Visual Studio! I wish it was more clear…
Yeh, the real problem with this is that the shortcuts for saving a source file and the project are the same and (on Mac at least) it appears the project save takes precedence so you can’t save a source file without clicking it from the menu. This has stung me a few times being halfway through editing a file (say a header) in the Introjucer, pressing cmd+s, switching to Xcode and editing the counterpart (cpp) then realising the header hasn’t saved and having to do a lot of copy and pase back in again. I guess this could be filed under bug.