You should use the new shared project support in vs2015 and above. It also supports library projects.

Shared projects can be located anywhere not just in the usual arduino locations. A shared project that contains a library.properties in the root is considered to be an arduino library.

Visual Micro will create an example for you if you enable the new "create a project when a library is selected" menu   checkbox on the Add Library menu. Switch it on and then select any arduino library as if adding to the current sketch code.



You can copy the resulting library project to a different location and then add it back into your solution. Then you just need to add it as a "Reference" to you sketch project.

With this combination visual micro will compile the library as a normal arduino library. If it has the same name as an existing arduino library the existing will be ignored. So you can add new or override any arduino library and locate in any folder. 

Code usage is standard arduino library #include syntax.

tip: this example uses an arduino library from below the arduino ide folder, which is not recommenced unless it is used as read/debug only. Ideally, copy the library to another location


You can also create shared projects from scratch (manually) using standard visual studio "file>new>project>c++>misc>shared project".