These are the steps you'll follow the first time you use the Rock solution. 1 . Open the Rock.sln file. This should launch Visual Studio 2022. 2. Edit the web.ConnectionStrings.config.sample and replace the [server_name], [database_name], [user_name], and [password] with the values for your system. When you're done it might look something like this: <add name="RockContext" connectionString="Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=RockTestDB; User Id=MyRockUser; password=yOursShouldBeBetter;MultipleActiveResultSets=true" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/> 3. Then rename the file to web.ConnectionStrings.config 4. Go to Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Manage NuGet Packages for Solution... 5. If you see a Restore button you'll need to click it in order to fetch the required open-source libraries Rock needs to compile. We don't ship them in the SDK in order to keep the file size small. After clicking "Restore" you can close the window. Manage NuGet Packages for Solution Press F5 to build and run (debug) Rock. After completing the compile/build process, it will start your web-browser (on something like http://localhost:57566/) and you'll see a white screen for several minutes while it creates the database. When finished, you will see a Login screen: Login ...and after logging in with 'admin' you should see this: Home That's it. Happy coding! Steps to keep your environment up-to-date with upcoming Rock releases: Subscribe to our developer group (in the Community Developer Subscribe sidebar) to get notified when a release goes alpha. Join the #develop channel on our community.rockrms.com/chat. Let us know you're new and a friendly developer in the community should greet you there. Pull the latest from the Rock repo as needed. We use a Gitflow Branching Strategy so if you wanted to only work from a particular release, you can pull that particular release-x.y.z branch. Hotfix branches are hotfix-x.y.z.