Building NSPR on Windows 10

Dear NSPRs,

I recently built NSPR on Windows 10, and I just wanted to confirm that
I went the correct route and didn't miss a step somewhere.

I downloaded the MozillaBuild package and started the start-shell.bat
script. I ran the configure command and it couldn't find a compiler.
So then I started on a journey of first configuring my PATH so that
the dev tools (and separately "mt") could be found, then configuring
INCLUDE so that the compiler could find the system headers, and
finally configuring LIBRARY so that the linker could find the system
libraries. This involved a fair amount of rummaging around in the
bowels of Visual Studio 2019, and hoping that the headers and
libraries I found were the correct ones.

Question - is this standard procedure? I understand that configuring
the Makefile to survive any environment - esp under Windows - would be
tough, but there's no mention of having to configure the dev
environment on the build instructions page.

Thanks for any enlightenment here.

regards
Jason
Spatial