the only way to get modules going under Active State AFAIK is with nmake. availible here occasionally you will fail on building modules because you do not have cl.exe or c1.dll both of these are availible in older versions Visual Studio. I got a student version several years ago for $150 i'm not sure if these can be found anywhere else. nmake is usually enough to build packages under windows.

Otherwise you can build with the version of perl that comes with cygwin.