If you administer a Microsoft® Internet Information Server or just use a Windows™ NT workstation connected to one, you should definitely get a copy of Active State's latest Perl executable!

The first port to Windows™ was funded by Microsoft® way back in 1993. This initial effort now makes it possible for Network administrators who are already familiar with Perl to use some of their programming experience on Microsoft® servers.

Even if you decide to install this version of the Win32 perl executable, you should still read the valuable information and carry out the tests under step 5) Checking and Testing your new perl installation of my main Perl page.

Take this link to the Active State website to download the latest build# of the Perl install that you desire to use (various platforms and versions). For Intel (PC) based machines running Windows:

ActiveState Perl can be acquired in different forms (including source code), but for most people, the .MSI file-type is likely the best one for you! The most recent build (#629 compiled in August of 2001) as an .MSI file is: ActivePerl-5.6.1.629-MSWin32-x86-multi-thread.msi; with a filesize of 8,330,240 bytes (7.94 MB). Standard Perl Packages included with Build 629.

The .MSI files require the Microsoft Windows Installer v1.1+ just to install (this is included with all Win ME and 2000 products). ActiveState provides links for the required programs/files. Note: If you have a Windows 9x OS, for some very specific applications you may need to install DCOM for your particular Windows version (DCOM95 or DCOM98). So, if you have Win9x as I do, you need to allow time for downloading about another 1 MB for at least the Windows Installer program.

There are a number of other issues related to using this port of Perl which you'll need to study. But, what you gain is certain to outweigh the initial loss of spending the extra time.

Archive-Tar      [0.072  ] module for manipulation of tar archives.
Compress-Zlib    [1.13   ] Interface to zlib compression library
Digest-MD5       [2.11   ] Perl interface to the MD5 Algorithm

File-CounterFile [0.12   ] Persistent counter class
Font-AFM         [1.18   ] Interface to Adobe Font Metrics files

HTML-Parser      [3.25   ] SGML parser class
HTML-Tagset      [3.03   ] Data tables useful in parsing HTML
HTML-Tree        [3.11   ] HTML syntax tree builder

MIME-Base64      [2.11   ] Encoding and decoding of base64 strings

PPM              [2.1.5  ] Perl Package Manager: locate, install, upgrade
                           software packages.

SOAP-Lite    [0.46   ] Library for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
                       clients and servers in Perl

URI          [1.11   ] Uniform Resource Identifiers (absolute and relative)
XML-Parser   [2.27   ] A Perl module for parsing XML documents

libnet       [1.07.03] Collection of Network protocol modules
libwin32     [0.17.3 ] A collection of extensions that aims to provide
                       comprehensive access to the Windows API.
libwww-perl  [5.51   ] Library for WWW access in Perl

Is it only a coincidence that "Active State Perl" has the same initals as "Active Server Pages" (.asp files) ? Hmm... I wonder... :-)

The "Active State" illustrations used here are Copyright©1999 by ActiveState Tool Corp.

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