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Setting up the MSVC environment

MSVC is a closed, proprietary C/C++ compiler developed and distributed by Microsoft; there is no real good reason justifying to use this proprietary compiler when a wonderful genuine free sw standard compiler is available on Windows as well [MinGW, MinGW].
Anyway MSVC is widely used by many Windows developers, and a no cost version is available: Visual Studio Express

As a general rule, building open source packages under MSVC is a little bit difficultiest as you can expect, mainly because this compiler lacks anything like ./configure scripts, and nmake only offers a minimal support roughly equivalent to make.
As a practical consequence, may well be that the supplied build scripts makefile.vc and nmake.opt would require some manual adjustment, so to accommodate for your specific platform layout.

I've succesfully built the following packages using this configuration:

Step 1) building FreeXL

FreeXL is an utility library implementing read-access for Excel (.xls) spreadsheets
Depends on: libiconv
Required by: spatialite-tools, libspatialite cd freexl-1.0.0b
nmake /f makefile.vc
nmake /f makefile.vc install

This will build and install both the static library and the DLL as well.

Step 2) building libspatialite

libspatialite is the main core of SpatiaLite
Depends on: libiconv, libproj, libgeos
Required by: spatialite-tools cd libspatialite-amalgamation-3.0.0-stable
nmake /f makefile.vc
nmake /f makefile.vc install

This will build and install both the static library and the DLL as well.

Step 3) building spatialite-tools

spatialite-tools the SpatiaLite command-line management tools
Depends on: libiconv, libproj, libgeos, libspatialite, libexpat cd spatialite-tools-3.0.0-stable
nmake /f makefile.vc
nmake /f makefile.vc install

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