Even though Autrijus kindly supplies pre-compiled PAR packages, I always roll my own and I have been using VC++ 6.0. I'm sure there are other Windows users who might if it were free, so I tried the free (and newer) Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003, also known as VC++ 7.
I found, as many have, that it is missing some pieces. There are a number of Windows header files not in the include dir (gee, why would Microsoft think a Windows compiler should need Windows headers ?!?), and a couple utilities not in the bin dir. They can be gotten for free from the SDK. Here is a good description from some Tcl people on finding all the pieces: http://wiki.tcl.tk/11431 Be aware that it takes a couple of Gigabytes of disk space to download and install the SDK, while you only need about 25 Megabytes of stuff from the include/bin dirs for Perl/PAR stuff. I installed it, copied what I needed to the Toolkit dirs and uninstalled the SDK. The Tcl discussion notes that some compiler options have changed. I got no errors with PAR/ActivePerl 5.6.1, but with PAR/ActivePerl 5.8.4 I got a warning about -Gf being deprecated in favor of -GF. I changed both occurances of -Gf to -GF in Config.pm and built clean. You could also just ignore the warning. It still works. HTH Alan Stewart
