diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index bed7013b..20acb25f 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@ What's new in psycopg 2.6.2
   (:ticket:`#352`).
 - Fixed `!PersistentConnectionPool` on Python 3 (:ticket:`#348`).
 - Added support for setuptools/wheel (:ticket:`#370`).
+- Fix build on Windows with Python 3.5, VS 2015 (:ticket:`#380`).
 - Fixed `!errorcodes.lookup` initialization thread-safety (:ticket:`#382`).
 
 
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index f83e8e39..8c7437d6 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -304,6 +304,10 @@ class psycopg_build_ext(build_ext):
             except AttributeError:
                 ext_path = os.path.join(self.build_lib,
                         'psycopg2', '_psycopg.pyd')
+            # Make sure spawn() will work if compile() was never
+            # called. https://github.com/psycopg/psycopg2/issues/380
+            if not self.compiler.initialized:
+                self.compiler.initialize()
             self.compiler.spawn(
                 ['mt.exe', '-nologo', '-manifest',
                  os.path.join('psycopg', manifest),