Is there such a thing as a "content/data only project" in visual studio

A work colleague has come up with a solution.

He has suggested hand editing the project to remove the DefaultTargets from the Project (and delete a load of now unused properties).

MSBuild complains if there are no targets in the project so he has added three empty targets.

The final project looks something like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>
    <Platform Condition=" '$(Platform)' == '' ">AnyCPU</Platform>
    <ProductVersion>9.0.30729</ProductVersion>
    <SchemaVersion>2.0</SchemaVersion>
    <ProjectGuid>{541463A7-7CFA-4F62-B839-6367178B16BD}</ProjectGuid>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    ... files ...
  </ItemGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    ... files ...
  </ItemGroup>
  <Target Name="Build"/>
  <Target Name="Rebuild"/>
  <Target Name="Clean"/>
</Project>

Admittedly, this solution requires more fiddling that I would have liked but seems to achieve what I was after: namely a project that does not aattempt to produce any build output.

Visual Studio 2015 has a project type called "Shared Project" which is essentially a content only project with no targets. It's listed under Visual C# but it can be used for any files.