Back in the mid 1990's, a company called Hip Software ported Perl to Win32. They got some funding from Microsoft for it, who were interested in a scripting language that wasn't VB. Hip called their port ActiveWare Perl.

A second, open-source, effort to port Perl was also going on, headed by Gurusamy Surathy. Both ports had their pros and cons. Gurusamy's focused on porting as much functionality as possible. ActiveWare's focused on Windows integration, especially with OLE, the IIS webserver and other Windows-specific technology. Both had the problem of trying to emulate *nix functionality on Windows 95...

Eventually Hip/ActiveWare became ActiveState and hired Gurusamy to lead the effort to merge the two Windows ports into what became ActivePerl, which is a solid port of Perl. It's free to download and includes access to the ActiveState Perl Repository, which is similar to CPAN, but with binaries pre-compiled for Windows. It uses PPM (Perl Package Manager) instead of the CPAN shell, but the latest version of PPM (those included in ActivePerl 5.10 or later, I believe) also let you install and manage CPAN packages. The MinGW PPM package installs the build tools necessary to compile binaries for CPAN installs. Some packages still won't install, of course, since Windows and Unix are still different beasts.

ActiveWare also ported ActivePython and ActiveTCL and sells Development Kits for Tcl and Perl that include various tools and a visual debugger. To make money, they sell a non-language-specific IDE/Editor and various support options for Enterprise customers. They also provide Unix ports of all the ActiveState language distributions.

If you're looking for a Win32/x64 Perl port, you might also try Strawberry Perl. It's an open source Perl port that is meant to run native similarly to the experience you'd have on Unix. Their front page says, "What isn't included? System conflicts and DLL hell." Having used Perl for Win32 since 5.005, I can honestly say I don't know what that's all about (one DLL is hardly hell and I haven't had a system conflict with Perl since the late 1990's), but I installed it last year and it worked well. I needed an SSH module that wouldn't compile with Strawberry Perl, so I went back to ActiveState, but it might work fine for you. Come to think of it, I don't need that SSH module anymore, so maybe I'll try it again myself.

Cheers!

ActivePerl is the industry-standard, commercial-grade Perl distribution used by millions of developers around the world for easy Perl installation and quality-assured code. ActivePerl comes pre-compiled for out-of-the-box installation and includes core Perl binaries, popular modules, the Perl Package Manager (PPM) and complete documentation. Whether you're using Perl for mission-critical applications or open source projects, ActivePerl offers significant time savings over open source Perl for installing, removing, upgrading, and managing common Perl modules.

ActivePerl comes in different editions to satisfy the spectrum of users - from large enterprises running Perl on distributed or critical applications to community developers building open source applications.

There are, AFAIK, two major Win32 Perls:   ActiveState and Strawberry.   I believe that it is safe to say that Active is generally oriented toward people who are perhaps more used to “the Windows way of doing things,” whereas Strawberry might be more satisfactory if you are accustomed to using the cpan command-line command.   “TMTOWTDI.”   Both of them seem to be quite successful in their objective of bringing Perl easily into the Win32 environment.