I built 2.7.11 on Win10 last Jan 16 with MCS v.1500 32 bit.  I believe that is VS2008.  Besides TortoiseHG, which I think is great, I downloaded SlikSVN minimal client only.  I somewhat arbitrarily picked it from some svn list.  http://www.sliksvn.com/en/download.  A suggestion, with note that minimal client is enough, would not help.  Tested install with 'svn help'. With that installed, pcbuild + appropriate args downloads all external dependencies needed.  F7 in VS GUI builds Python binary, no Perl needed.  The docs, including readme.TXT, are much better than 3 or 4 years ago.  (At the time, there was an undocumented requirement, to run tkinter, to move/copy some tcl/tk files.  Zack fixed the build script to make manual step unneeded.)  Obviously still needs improvement.