If you want to build the ICU Libraries from source yourself, you could use either Cygwin/MSVC, like I do, or use the Visual Studio solution included with the sources. Cygwin/MSVC will need to be run several times with various options to get to build the binaries I provide below. Using the Visual Studio Solution is trivial to build the shared ICU library, however it cannot at the time of writing this, produce static libraries, which may be of interest.
Below you can download the pre-built libraries with Cygwin/MSVC for both 32 and 64-bit Windows:
icu-50.1.2-shared-vs2010.7z [12.6 MB] [MD5: 4a79e6e3e97f6aa28914065824ca9abc]icu-50.1.2-static-vs2010.7z [25.7 MB] [MD5: a2e417c47d400536ec96d41b0c8b09a7]
icu-50.1.2-shared-vs2012.7z [12.9 MB] [MD5: 4ab0534a54590d40fc99d8f422a29bcc]icu-50.1.2-static-vs2012.7z [29.5 MB] [MD5: 7e9d03c1920f67e53e55e74f0c8f60dd]
You will need Cygwin and Microsoft Visual C++. I use Cygwin Portable and 7-zip if you want to create the 7z packages and I use Jem Berkes’ MD5sums 1.2 to generate the md5 checksums for the archives.
I am attaching build-icu.bat the batch script that I wrote to build and package these binaries. Be aware that it isn’t thoroughly tested.