Strawberry Perl for Windows

For a long time I neglected this project but today I create a fresh VMware image of Windows XP and installed Strawberry Perl on it. I was surprised to see how nice it is! It already comes with a pre-configured CPAN-shell and everything else you need to compile modules that use C. You don't even have to setup your CPAN mirror as they already pre-configured one for you.

I am about to show [dist://Win32::GuiTest] in class. I know it works well on ActivePerl but there you get a binary version of it. I wanted to see how does it work on Strawberry Perl. It works. Great.

Then I also wanted to try [dist://Win32::GUIRobot] as that is supposed to be a superset of Win32::GuiTest. Unfortunately one of its dependencies [dist://Prima] did not install easily. I had to run Makefile.PL manually. After some fighting I managed to install that too so I hope I'll be able to play around with it. I would not be able to do so in ActivePerl as there is no pre-compiled version of this module. I have already asked Randy Kobes to prepare one, so by the time you are reading this you might already find one but in the long run I don't want to rely on this.

If you would like to get involved in the work on Strawberry Perl the place you should start looking at is the Win32 Perl wiki.