It looks like I will need to enter the strange new (to me) world of XS development for a project I am working on, I'm new to this, so I need advice.

I am working on an embedded project using a Cygnal 8051F330 and the IDE SiLabs (formerly Cygnal) provides with their dev kit. They also provide a few DLLs that allow programmatic manipultion of a connected system. My plan is to use Test::More and friends to automate some tests on the system. To do this I need to use the DLL to control the test system.

I am using Windows XP and Active State Perl 5.6.1. Active State uses MSVC to compile Perl. I don't have MSVC, is this going to prevent me from creating functional XS code? From the docs it seems like the tools used to build perl need to be the same as those used to build any XS code. Is this true or am I missing something obvious? Is there another approach to talking to a DLL that I am overlooking?