Expat can be built on Windows in two ways:
  using MS Visual Studio .NET or Cygwin.

* Cygwin:
  This follows the Unix build procedures.

* MS Visual Studio 2013 and 2015:
  A solution file for Visual Studio 2013 is provided: expat.sln.
  The associated project files (*.vcxproj) reside in the appropriate
  project directories. This solution file can be opened in VS 2015
  and should be upgraded automatically if VS 2013 is not also installed.
  Note: Tests have their own solution files.

* All MS C/C++ compilers:
  The output for all projects will be generated in the win32\bin
  directory, intermediate files will be located in project-specific
  subdirectories of win32\tmp.
  
* Creating MinGW dynamic libraries from MS VC++ DLLs:
  
  On the command line, execute these steps:
  pexports libexpat.dll > expat.def
  pexports libexpatw.dll > expatw.def
  dlltool -d expat.def -l libexpat.a
  dlltool -d expatw.def -l libexpatw.a
  
  The *.a files are mingw libraries.

* Special note about MS VC++ and runtime libraries:

  There are three possible configurations: using the
  single threaded or multithreaded run-time library,
  or using the multi-threaded run-time Dll. That is, 
  one can build three different Expat libraries depending
  on the needs of the application.

  Dynamic Linking:

  By default the Expat Dlls are built to link statically
  with the multi-threaded run-time library. 
  The libraries are named
  - libexpat(w).dll 
  - libexpat(w).lib (import library)
  The "w" indicates the UTF-16 version of the library.

  One rarely uses other versions of the Dll, but they can
  be built easily by specifying a different RTL linkage in
  the IDE on the C/C++ tab under the category Code Generation.

  Static Linking:

  The libraries should be named like this:
  Single-theaded:     libexpat(w)ML.lib
  Multi-threaded:     libexpat(w)MT.lib
  Multi-threaded Dll: libexpat(w)MD.lib
  The suffixes conform to the compiler switch settings
  /ML, /MT and /MD for MS VC++.
  
  Note: In Visual Studio 2005 (Visual C++ 8.0) and later, the
  single-threaded runtime library is not supported anymore.

  By default, the expat-static and expatw-static projects are set up
  to link statically against the multithreaded run-time library,
  so they will build libexpatMT.lib or libexpatwMT.lib files.

  To build the other versions of the static library, 
  go to Project - Settings:
  - specify a different RTL linkage on the C/C++ tab
    under the category Code Generation.
  - then, on the Library tab, change the output file name
    accordingly, as described above

  An application linking to the static libraries must
  have the global macro XML_STATIC defined.