I'm not fond of windows but I'm not a zealot. I've spent about a week now trying my best to get an automation install working in windows but every time I take a step, I slam into a brick wall.

The current problem I'm facing appears to be a bug in ExtUtils/MM_Win32.pm. From another thread (http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=603230) I found that that module determines what the directory file separation character(s) should be. Testing it with dmake and mingw make in the path and also set in Config.pm never changes $self->make in MM_Win32.pm. Since it thinks the make tool is nmake instead of dmake og mingw make, it resorts to '^\' for a separator that doesn't work with those two make tools. I'm uncompressing the Microsoft Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure 1.0 that should have the tools in it I need according to another thread I've seen. I'm curious if it has nmake with 64bit support as well as ia64 support. If not, I'm back to square one with Windows.

As for modules that work in windows and not in linux or vice versa, that's already understood. We have a procedure in place for that. Basically we test out each module before deploying it and mark what OSes the module works in.

So the question remains, how can we build across multiple platforms in windows? Everything I see for the MS C++ compiler is 32bit only which will work for the x86_64 platforms but not for ia64 (well... it isn't ideal). Do you have experience using the Visual Studio 9.0 (free version) on the different platforms. IE does it work?