OK, for the introduction - I'm completely dummy in programming. And I have no intention of learning it now, got other things to do.

But I think that it would be nice to see some tutorial how to apply patches for complete newbies. With all the steps, from choosing a program to install to explaining output files. Honestly, I don't even know in what language is Bitcoin written, but I suppose it's C# (?), because some people here said something about (Microsoft?) Visual Studio...

Now digging into details: I want to apply this patch http://github.com/m0mchil/bitcoin-getwork and from what I understand, a self-made build of Bitcoin is necessary. If this was discussed earlier, please redirect me, maybe I was searching wrongly.

Alternatively, someone keen could build a binary with this patch applied... But an explanation would still be nice.

OK, problem solved, I just needed to read the tutorial to OpenCL mining. Thanks for the answers though. I'd like to have two misc questions: do I have to have the option "Generate coins" in Bitcoin enabled when mining with poclbm? And the second question: when I close poclbm, does my work get saved somewhere? Or does it have to be running all the time until it generates a block?