I'm a somewhat newbie to Perl, but I have been using ActiveState a while and have progressed to downloading and installing a few packages from CPAN. I thought I was doing well, until I banged my head into Win32::OLE, which appears to have some C++ code in it that must be compiled.

The Module tutorial on Perl Monks (A Practical Guide to Compiling C based Modules under ActiveState using Microsoft C++) says "Get Visual C++ .NET"

I guess that's the only answer. But I really don't want to give $85 to Microsoft. I downloaded the free Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 instead.

I almost get there with it. It has the cl.exe compiler, and nmake, etc. It has many of the header files. I can almost compile the module. But I keep running into files like ocidl.h that don't exist in the free version.

I notice these files seem to exist in non-Microsoft places, such as Wine and Borland. But the ones I looked at don't seem to be quite the right thing. I get compile errors. .. Lots .. of .. errors.

So my question to anyone familiar with Win32::OLE under Windows, is there any way to get the package installed without buying the .NET package?? Do all these many include files exist online somewhere?

Or, is there somewhere that a pre-compiled binary version of Win32 that I can just drop into the appropriate directories and skip the compile step?

Am I overlooking something obvious?