Noda Time is developed on Visual Studio 2022. All editions of Visual Studio 2022, including the community edition, should be able to build Noda Time, so long as you also have the .NET SDK installed. We periodically update the version of the .NET SDK that we build with, typically to the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version, but occasionally a more recent version in order to use the latest C# features. See the root global.json file to determine which version of the SDK is required, then download it if necessary.
To fetch the source code from the main GitHub repository, you'll need a git client. You may also want a Git GUI, such as SourceTree.
To fetch the source code, just clone the GitHub repository:
> git clone https://github.com/nodatime/nodatime.git
To build everything under Visual Studio, simply open the src\NodaTime.sln file.
To build with just the .NET SDK, run
> dotnet build src/NodaTime.sln
To run the tests:
> dotnet test src/NodaTime.Test
Bash scripts are used for more complex tasks such as updating TZDB. Many contributors will never need to run these scripts, but just occasionally they may be useful when investigating a CI failure.
These should largely work from any bash environment, but the one used by the maintainers is the version included with Git for Windows, also sometimes known as "git bash". Please file an issue if you need to run a script but have trouble doing so.