There are several steps you need to do to start working:

In order to build and develop bitcoin core you will need:

1. Visual Studio of your choice, express version will suffice. Everyone knows where Microsoft lives...

2. Perl, required to build openssl and QT. I like Active Perl, but it is just my personal preference. Could be downloaded from here: http://www.perl.org/
   You have to be careful to position Perl in PATH variable so that it will be first to execute. GIT and MinGW are bundled with versions of Perl which are not compatible and will fail the build if executed. There is a pending issue at openssl repo for this bug (openssl/openssl#174).

PATH=C:\Program Files\Perl\bin\;C:\Program Files\git\cmd\;C:\Windows\SYSTEM32...

3. Python, required to build boost. Could be downloaded from here: https://www.python.org/

The only dependency that comes from outside of GitHub is 'berkeleydb'. It is downloaded from here: http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.8.30.NC.zip and extracted into \dependencies\db-4.8.30.NC during build.

• Clone this repository into your local system.
• Update all sub-modules recursively.

By default all projects from 'Dependencies' folder are excluded from buld to speed things up during development. I recomend building them one by one manually by right clicking on each and selecting 'build'. You have to start with 'zlib' because it is used in 'boost' and 'openssl' the rest could be built in any order.

Building of all these project generates bunch of files and directories. I've organized them as follows:

• All intermediate files generated by these project are placed into /Dependensies/obj/... directory. It is safe to keep untill the time one of the dependency project has been updated with new version. Than just delete it and rebuild all dependencies.
• Built libraries are installed into /packages directory at the root of the superproject. It is consistent with NuGet dependency manager and done so it could be easy to add or switch to one of the packages managed by NuGet.

• Build is following regular Visual Studion practices and should be self explanatory.

• All tests are building now
• 129 tests are passing.