Same here, although I did have some luck getting perl -MCPAN -e shell to work on my machine, took some configuration especially with the Visual Studio paths so it could find Nmake. But at least this way I can get the CPAN modules in place without having to worry about what ActiveState has. I already have the SDK installed, but thanks, that was a good tip.

What I'd really like is a 64 bit version of Socket6 for some IPv6 work I am trying to do, but its not out there and I don't know enough C level stuff to even know where to being porting it to 64 bit land.

If I get any more good tips or ideas about what to do I'll add it here.

Socket6-0.19 (from cpan) builds fine for me on ActiveState's 64-bit version of build 822 (perl 5.8.8), and passes the test suite.

I used the previously-mentioned SDK (which comes with its own nmake). I don't have Visual Studio at all.

If you want the build, /msg me your email address and I'll send it over. Or do you need a version suitable for use with 5.10 ?

Cheers,
Rob

Some great info from syphilis on this and I wanted to post it here so anyone else hitting the same issue can have the steps that worked for me.

I have my "Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2" installed in C:\_64\Platform_SDK .

I have a batch file (sdk.bat) that contains the followng 2 lines

set INCLUDE=
C:\_64\Platform_SDK\SetEnv.cmd /XP64 /RETAIL
[download]

To use that compiler, I just run 'sdk.bat' from the command line, and that sets up the environment correctly so that things like nmake (which is located in C:\_64\Platform_SDK\Bin) get found automatically.

The first line of that batch file simply clears the existing INCLUDE setting. The "XP64" part is obviously the right thing to specify on XP - and it's the right thing to specify on Vista.

Note, the SetEnv.cmd file actually notes in the beginning of the file the proper flag to use for various Windows OS versions, if unsure what it should be check that file before creating your batch.

Some other things I found out, when trying to compile Socket6 (whether using CPAN or manually running the module make and compile) be sure that the compiler that was used to install Perl is on the path. If the make cannot find the same compiler the make will choke, this happened to me on a couple of Solaris boxes and on AIX. To find out what compiler was used for Perl run:

perl -V

Yes, that is an upper case V, you should see something like:

Compiler: cc='cc', ccflags ='-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -xarch=v8 -D_TS_ERRNO',

If that does not match what the Makefile has there will be problems, the solution that was necessary for me on Solaris and AIX is that we needed to adjust the paths in my shell to avoid use of gcc which was not used for the perl compiles but was getting picked up in my environment. In addition, on AIX it will sometimes be configured to have something like cc_r as the base compiler, which is a link to xlc, and the way they are called can be hairy. There is more information on this here - Embedded Perl on AIX

Sorry to mix stuff here, but I was working on multiple platforms and I ended up wanting to keep this all together.