This is a collection of modules stolen from the Activeware port
and modified so that they will build under MakeMaker using perls
greater than 5.003_99 and Visual C++.  If you only have 5.003_99, you
will need to apply the supplied patch to the perl5.003_99 sources.
Read the instructions at the top of the patch file, apply it,
rebuild perl and install it before attempting to build these extensions.

The following extensions have been "ported":

    Win32/EventLog
    Win32/File
    Win32/FileSecurity
    Win32/NetAdmin
    Win32/NetResource
    Win32/OLE
    Win32/Registry
    Win32/Service
    Win32/WinError

All of the extensions have been re-engineered to use the XS
interface language.  Working on these has become a rather
unpleasant task due to what I consider to be poor design and
implementation of these modules.  While I have tried to keep my
changes compatible with the originals at the present time, I plan
to rework these modules radically once there is full port of all
the Activeware extensions.

Building:

    + You need to extract this into an NTFS file system (the
      tests in the FileSecurity module and Net* modules will
      fail otherwise).  The testsuite for OLE needs Excel to
      run.  NetAdmin will only work if you have some kind of
      live network connection.  NetResource requires that you
      be part of a domain or workgroup.  If one or more of
      these conditions will not be met, you may wish to build
      in the subdirectories one by one.  The steps below will
      work either at the toplevel directory, or in each of the
      individual extension subdirectories.
   
    + You need MS Visual C++ (NetAdmin needs ver. 4.0+, ver. 2.0
      should suffice for the others).
   
    + perl Makefile.PL
   
    + nmake
   
    + nmake test					[optionally]
   
    + nmake install

I hope this kickstarts the process of bringing the divergant Win32::
extensions back into the MakeMaker fold.

The following modules available in the Activeware port are not
available in this one:

    Win32/ChangeNotify
    Win32/IPC
    Win32/Mutex
    Win32/Process
    Win32/Semaphore

They are waiting on the availability of the CPerl object in core
perl (I may rework them to not rely on CPerl).

Suggestions, patches, rewrites and additional ports of modules welcome.

Gurusamy Sarathy
gsar@umich.edu
11-MAY-1997