We've had success compiling reciprocate under Visual Studio .NET version 7.0
and 7.1. It will not work older compilers. Here's what we did:

1) Checked out the "sip" repository so that it became C:\sip on our machine.

2) In Visual Studio, opened the project file C:\sip\resiprocate.sln
   (it complained a bit about needing to upgrade the project files - we
    said ok)

3) Started a build

SipIMP and limpc might complain about a missing library, but you don't need
those things for the reciprocate stack anyway - they are just test programs