Perl has adequate support for Win32 programming, but the core distribution can be lacking in some areas. Here's how an 'icky' situation helped me discover a great Win32 perl programming resource.

The other day a virus infected my Win32 box. I’m still not sure if this actually was a virus, or just a ‘feature’ of my Windows 98 box. Anyway, it screwed up my File Type Associations to the point of Windows not knowing what program it should use to open up any darn file on my system.

Anyway, work was getting me down, and I was bored. So, I decided to play around with ways of fixing this situation using Perl. After a little scouring on the ‘net I came across this cool Win32 Perl resource site, very originally named Jenda's pages (mirror here). It had on it a few modules I hadn’t seen on CPAN before, and some of which turned out to be pretty handy.

For my situation, I picked up on Win32::FileType and had fun playing around with my file type associations. This neat little module allowed me to swap all my icons and even allow me connect to the same file type in on a remote computer.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this great resource I found. It’s got some handy little modules, most of which that aren’t available on CPAN, and some of which have been salvaged while the original authors and sites have gone AWOL. If you’re a frequent programmer on Win32 platforms, then there might be something here you find useful.

Here are just some of the highlights:

• Win32::FileType
  Create and modify file type mapping in Win95/98/NT
  
  
• Win32::AbsPath
  Used for converting relative paths to absolute paths.
  
  
• Win32::Lanman
  Lan manager functions including everything that you find in the Server-Manager, User-Manager, Dfs-Manager, Event-Viewer and more.

Just before posting this article, I decided to just do a quick check, and my suspicions were confirmed; Jenda is in fact a Perl Monk. So, I guess some big kudos goes out to Jenda for putting these great resources together on his site.

- wil