Comment 4 for bug 1132270

It is possible with a few caveats. The problem is that several files in the igraph source code are generated by GNU tools; typically the lexers and parsers of foreign graph formats are generated by bison. We do not store these generated C source files in the repository - we store the original input files instead. The consequence is that if you check out the repo, you won't have all the required C files in the repo, some of them still have to be generated. Our makefiles do that automatically, but since you plan to compile it using MS tools, this is not an option.

We usually do the following when we want to compile igraph using MS tools (which is required for the Windows version of the Python interface anyway):

1. We check out the repo in a GNU system, run ./bootstrap.sh, then run "make msvc". This generates a ZIP file that contains all the necessary stuff to compile igraph in the Microsoft Visual Studio - it even has a project file, which is usually slightly out-of-date, but we usually fix that before release ;)

2. We take the generated ZIP file, copy it to a Windows virtual machine, extract it, fire up VIsual Studio and then compile igraph there.

So, the bottom line is that it works but it requires some extra legwork and a working GNU environment.