The XS version requires make (nmake did not work).

This is wrong on at least two levels.

There are three flavours of make-style programs for Windows Perl - nmake.exe from Microsoft, dmake.exe (originally Watcom?) and the Borland

make.exe</p>. ActiveState Perl is the only Perl that uses and supports
+ PPM, and it will always be configured to use  <c>nmake.exe</p>.
<p>If you want to <i>install</i> modules via CPAN, you need a <c>make
[download]

-style program. If you want to compile XS components, you need not only a make-style program but also the (exact) C compiler that your Perl was compiled with. ActiveState Perl is built using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 (MSVC6), so you will need that. You can get adventurous and also configure it to use the MinGW build of gcc, which then turns your ActiveState Perl into a Perl that can easily build self-contained XS distributions from CPAN as well.