Compiling Winboard 4.8 using Visual Studio 2019

[danzman]

Has anybody tried using VS2019 in compiling WB? If successful, how was it done? I am new to Visual Studio. I have been a programmer for over 20 years but have worked mostly with Fortran and Pascal. If I can compile WB with VS2019, I can then add some functionality with WB. I have also developed an electronic chessboard which I plan to use with WB:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czQFRmTiu3o&t=194s. I can easily decipher WB and make it compatible with the chessboard.
I tried compiling WB but ran into errors. Can anybody point me the way to compile it?
Thanks.

[H.G.Muller]

I always use gcc under Cygwin to compile WinBoard. Although I once tried MinGW, and that worked too. (But I could not use the makefile, and had to enter the commands by hand.) I never tried with a MicroSoft compiler. We used to support that, through a project file in the source distro. But we haven't had a VS user in the development team for a long time, to update it. So it probably doesn't work anymore.

What kind of errors do you get?

Btw, for interfacing with an electronic chessboard I would prefer to have the driver code not in the WinBoard executable itself, but as an independent program that would communicate with the GUI like an engine. (I.e. as a pseudo-engine.) If this would limit what the board can do, I would rather extend the communication protocol than integrate the code into WinBoard. A modular approach is much more versatile, as the pseudo-engine could also be used under other GUIs.