Installed the free Platform SDK will get you MS's C compiler/other C tools if you don't want to pay for Visual Studio. It will be enough to compile all code that AS's PPM offers. AS's PPM archive does a good job in building thing within a 1-3 days of releasing a module, but anything that requires Unix d/make syntax, manual cmd line makefile.pl parameters, 3rd party .lib/.a files, POSIX APIs, Configure, user interactive setup during makefile.pl, won't build on AS's PPM system. http://www.cpantesters.org/ is a good website also to see if anyone can automated build/install the module.