Please report back, if you do succeed building a 64-bit Perl with the Visual Studio 2005 compiler.

I did try, too. However, the build process only got as far as creating the miniperl binary, which is used to bootstrap the further steps. The show stopper was that the miniperl segfaulted.

I haven't yet had time, nor patience, to look into why (this was for a project at work with deadline overdue...), so I went back to the Visual Studio .NET 2003 suite, which did work, more or less. I still got a gazillion of compiler warnings about "possible data loss, due to 64 --> 32 bit truncation" (or some such), but all in all, most of the tests still succeeded, i.e. 99.9%. (/msg me if you want more info -- right now, I don't remember the details, but I could look them up, as soon as I'm back at work...)

A minor problem with the 2003 64-bit compiler was, that it doesn't support inline assembly (as used by the Win32::API module in a couple of places). Luckily, I didn't really need that specific functionality for the project, so I could get away with disabling the problematic sections of the code...

<rant> I share your sentiments about the MS website... And, remotely related, I'm sooo glad to have the priviledge to run Linux most of the time. Even at work. I tell ya whut :) </rant>