The Wiki:

Visual Studio (Windows)

If you can't be arsed to do any of this yourself, then I have uploaded a complete visual studio 2010 project with source (as of latest 64.2). http://www.box.net/shared/xzarykzoraiorpi41iy1 It has all the libraries and headers you need to compile the latest version, it statically links everything so no .dll's needed! It also has a git repository in it, which you *should* be able to pull from. It doesn't run quite as fast as the official, and setting floats from Lua/PROP may crash... but you can easily add things for testing :)

Download Visual Studio Express 2010 C++ because of it's great debugging and auto-code tools. It is completely free.
Open Visual Studio. If you didn't get a product key, go to Visual Studio Keys (this isn't pirating, Visual Studio is free.)
If you wish, (highly recommended), turn on line numbers by going to Tools > Options > Text Editor > C/C++, and turn on "Line numbers" in the Display subsection.

Press File > New > New Project from Existing Code

Choose the folder from your source code folder.

Choose Windows application project and leave everything unchecked. Press "Next" until you get to the end without changing any options, and then press "Finish"

Open up one of the source files, like main.c

Go to Project > Properties > Configuration Properties > Linker > Input.

Open the drop down menu under "Additional Dependencies," click edit, and enter the following text:

shell32.lib
ws2_32.lib
wsock32.lib
\Libraries\SDL.lib
\Libraries\SDLmain.lib
\Libraries\libbz2.lib
\Libraries\regex.lib
\Libraries\pthreadVC2.lib
\Libraries\Lua51.lib

Remember to change to the full path-name of your source folder.

Press OK.

Go to Project > Properties > Configuration Properties > VC++ Directories.

Open the drop down menu for Include Directories and add the folders

* \Includes
* \Libraries
* these can be found here: Required Libraries

Once again, remember to change to the full path-name of your source folder.

Hit OK.
Select the entire solution and press Ctrl+F7 or the green arrow at the top.

If an error message comes up warning you of a missing DLL, go to the source-required folder you downloaded and copy the DLLs from into your "" folder.

If something goes wrong, ask on The Powder Toy forums

Tavis123:

I have read the wiki and to me i doesn't make sense.