Welcome Kuzma!
I used 4zb4's link with great success, I'm glad to see the old forums still survives to leak its holy knowledge to us. I ended up modifying the makefile which seemed to be the most straightforward way. mingw is good and compiled the LIVAN source for me and I recommend it (I felt quite manly when it compiled for the first time). I used Programmer's Notepad 2 to make a short-cut that automates the build command (but that's a pretty standard thing to do when you're not a command-line junkie).
While I don't use Visual Studio for code compilation (for some strange reason), I definitely use it for source-diving since it has a totally indispensable search-tool. If you can get LIVAN to compile via VS, then stick with that because then you'll be able to do everything from one package.
Batman? wrote
its been so long since i had gotten that far i didnt think it through. arrrr!!!!!!