Microsoft partners with Strawberry Perl to improve the CPAN

Just came across this: http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/38036

Commencing this month, Microsoft will be providing every CPAN author with free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows.

The result is now practically the entire Perl community has a zero-cost and zero-setup way to doing light development, problem replication, debugging, and ad-hoc hesting on every version of Windows.

This arrangement is particularly amazing because it is, to my knowledge, several orders of magnitude larger than anything of this nature ever attempted before with the Open Source community.

(Also posted @ /.)

Comment on Microsoft partners with Strawberry Perl to improve the CPAN

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Re: Microsoft partners with Strawberry Perl to improve the CPAN by creamygoodness (Curate) on Dec 07, 2008 at 16:38 UTC
This is pretty nice. I'll be using this service, though I'm not sure how heavily. I run Vista using VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro for the express purpose of testing my CPAN distros, 3 out of 4 of which are XS. This testing rig was instrumental in garnering so-far perfect CPAN Testers records for the latest releases of Lingua::Stem::Snowball and Sort::External. One thing left out of this initiative is MSVC. Installing and setting up the free version of MSVC is still a pain. And if you want to guarantee that your code is compatible with MSVCRT.dll, you need MSVC 6, and that means doing something "very expensive or very illegal". Seems like the "very illegal" option isn't going to fly on MS-provided virtual boxen. MS could fix the problem at the source and disentangle the crazy manifesting dll hell of recent MSVC releases, but in the meantime it's still going to be much much too complicated to fully support Microsoft as an open source author. -- Marvin Humphrey	[reply]
Re^2: Microsoft partners with Strawberry Perl to improve the CPAN by adamk (Chaplain) on Dec 08, 2008 at 07:06 UTC
One problem at a time please...	[reply]
Re^3: Microsoft partners with Strawberry Perl to improve the CPAN by HeatSeekerCannibal (Beadle) on Dec 10, 2008 at 16:06 UTC
Well I think its a very good first step. Congratulations. Heatseeker Cannibal	[reply]
Re: Microsoft partners with Strawberry Perl to improve the CPAN by Anonymous Monk on Nov 08, 2011 at 04:43 UTC
Sunday July 19, 2009 Microsoft Open Source Network CPAN Author Lab is now open [irc://irc.perl.org/#msopensource]	[reply]
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