How do I use heat.exe with Visual Studio extension?

[ArmorBearer]

Reposted from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78202742/how-do-i-use-heat-exe-with-visual-studio-extension

The Wix toolset (v.3) has a tool called heat.exe for "harvesting" files in a particular location and generating a .wxs file which specifies the files which will be part of an installer package.

Our current Wix code uses heat to harvest our application files, but now I am trying to set this up in a Visual Studio project for the installer, which uses the Wix v3 Visual Studio 2022 extension.

How do I get heat working in conjunction with a Visual Studio project? Does that even make sense?

Or should I simply run heat once, manually, and then include the generated .wxs in the project as a source file?
(This is really not ideal, because it would mean I have to monitor the VS solution for any added/removed files and manually run heat again, replacing the generated .wxs each time.)