Trouble Getting Started

So, this is a bit embarrassing for me, as I've been a professional programmer for nearly a decade now, but I'm having trouble even getting started with developing my first plugin. I'll try to be as thorough as I can in my description, in case the problem lies in the version of VS, or an incorrect configuration, or some silly user error like that.  The short version of my problem is: I can't even build the renamed Skeleton project.

I have AE CS3, so that's the SDK I downloaded, and I'm developing on Win 7 64 using Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition.

I copied the Skeleton project over and renamed all the files(changin Skeleton to my project name), then did a case-sensitive Find-and-Replace for SKELETON to PROJECTNAME and Skeleton to ProjectName.  I did the renaming via Visual Studio's Find and Replace, without a solution open, looking through *.* in the ProjectName directory.  Then I opened the sln file, and it upgraded it from VS 7.1 format to VS 10.

I then looked through the project settings and found that Additional Include Directories had several entries in the form of "../../../Include".  I had put my copy of Skeleton into a directory where I normally keep my programming projects (ie, not in the SDK directory), so I changed all of these entries to absolute paths.  Then, to be double sure, I added the SDK's "Include" and "Util" directories to the project's "Include Directories".

When I try to build, I get two errors, saying it cannot build the PiPL.r and the PiPL.rrc files (I do not recall the exact filenames, something like ProjectName_PiPL.*) because it cannot find the specified files.  The .r file does exist, but the .rrc file does not (a .rc file does, but not a .rrc).  Additionally, I can't find anything about a .rrc file in the documentation, and cannot find any information on basic "How Do I Setup Visual Studio to Build the SDK" type information in the documentation or the web.  I also looked for the custom build steps that are trying to build these files but cannot find them.  Before each file, the Output Window says something like "Building the PiPLs" and when I search for that text, it is in the Project File, but when I check the Custom Build Steps and Build Events sections in the properites they are all empty.

I was able to mostly create the effect I want using expressions inside AE, but I could do it better as a plugin, and besides I'm just really annoyed that I can't solve this basic problem.

Thanks for listening!