Does anyone know how to get hlsl shaders working in ue4??

All I want to do is write a simple vertex lit shader in visual studio, save it, and put it on an object in ue4

is that a thing?

It's not for everyone, but I made a unit testing framework for HLSL shaders. It executes your shaders on the CPU, in a little virtual machine, so it can be run on a CI server etc.

http://timjones.tw/blog/archive/2014/01/07/introducing-hlslunit-unit-tests-for-your-hlsl-shader-code