Building -------------------------- Rainmeter can be built using the free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop or any paid version of VS2012 (e.g. Professional). Note some projects (such as the NowPlaying plugin) cannot be built with the free Express version. The free VS2012 Express is available for download from: http://microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-for-windows-desktop VS2012 Update 2 is also required for Windows XP targeting support. It is available from: http://microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-visual-studio-2012-update Once both Visual Studio and Update 1 have been installed, open Rainmeter.sln to build projects. With VS2012 Express, you may want to use RainmeterCPP.sln, which does not include projects that cannot be built with it. Building installer -------------------------- To build the full Rainmeter distribution, run Build.bat. If you receive "not found" errors, open Build.bat and change the variables at the top to match your system. To sign the installer and the Rainmeter executables, create a Certificate.bat file alongside Build.bat with the following contents: set CERTFILE=/path/to/PFXcert.p12 set CERTKEY=certpassword Building old versions -------------------------- The Rainmeter GitHub repository does not contain the full source code history required to build the installer for versions prior to r1249. To obtain the full source from r1 to r1248, use the old Google Code SVN repository located at: http://rainmeter.googlecode.com/svn The build instructions above are applicable to r1130 - r1248. Build instructions for r27 - r1129 can be found in svn/wiki/. The language files for r963 - r1214 were in a separate repository (svn:externals), which is not available any longer. As a result, the language .dll's for those revisions cannot be built.