Facing the foe of the unknown with a brave grimace.
Thanks to James Tan from New Zealand game studio Digital Confectioners, who last night generously gave up his hour from 11pm to midnight via chat to help me out with prepping to add a custom blueprint to the solution of my Unreal project in Visual Studio. I didn't get to the actual blueprint coding, but it was really instructive how he helped me out with making sure VisualStudio Express found my project. It seems that, if you are doing a Blueprints Only project and you want to add some code to it, the easiest thing to do is go in the editor and choose File menu > Add Code to Project. Then open the UE4.sln in VS and there'll be a Games folder added in there with the relevant project showing. Sweet. Sounds easy enough. On the way to doing that, we fiddled around with doing a thing or two manually with generative batch files and shifting around folder paths for a while. But in the process of sorting things out, I was introduced to http://pastebin.com/ and http://www.screenleap.com/ ... which are very handy online utilities indeed.
Part 2 will be trying to write a bit of actual code. Brave grimace.