Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, the developer of Strawberry Perl to make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world. During last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. However there are still tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN which are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing.
Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. The entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organizational details will ironed at a later phase.
Strawberry Perl is described at the project site as "The first Perl on any OS with out-the-box CPAN tool chain auto-upgrade support and as an 100% Open Source CPAN-capable Perl for Windows® computer that works exactly the same as Perl everywhere else.