As reported on slashdot, Microsoft has made the MSVC command line compiler tools for .net and Win32 available for download at no cost here.

While the EULA does not permit redistribution of GNU-infected software ("software that requires you to redistribute the sourcecode"), it is free to use in commercial settings and, considering that customers can also download it, good enough to install and use Perl extensions such as Inline::C and DBD::SQLite, and even for compiling your own version of Perl.

The download weighs in at 32MB and I believe it includes the .net runtime as well, so Win9x users will have to download and unpack it somewhere else before getting the Win32 tools under Win9x.

Update: At the moment, I'm not clear whether the compiler actually outputs Win32 stuff or only .net stuff, but I'll update that post after my investigations :)

I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, that the compiler builds miniperl directly respectively with a small fix to the CFLAGS in win32\Makefile: 

CFLAGS        = -nologo -GF /QIfist -W3 $(INCLUDES) $(DEFINES) $(LOCDE
+FS) \

[download]
The -GF replaces -Gf, and /QIfist is so that it doesn't generate calls to __ftol2, which it later on can't resolve.

The bad news is, that you have to be very clean about your library paths and include paths, especially the VC6 path. And that means, no VC6 includes for VC7 (no surprise here), but the includes you need aren't in the package. You'll have to download them from Microsoft as well, either via some dreaded ActiveX installation procedure here, or manually from http://download.microsoft.com/download/platformsdk/sdk/update/win98mexp/en-us.... I couldn't find out the exact URL yet, as the messagebox does not allow copy/paste, but once download.microsoft.com picks up speed again, I'll post the full URLs to the (two) SDKs needed here.

In reply to Microsoft releases the MSVC commandline tools by Corion

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