VANCOUVER, British Columbia – February 5, 2002 – ActiveState, the leader in open source programming languages, today announced the release of the Perl Dev Kit (PDK) 4.0, which adds support for the Microsoft .NET Framework, Win 9x and HP-UX. Existing Perl scripts can now be turned into .NET components and used seamlessly in .NET Framework applications. Current users will find that PDK 4.0 creates Perl components on Windows that are 30% to 50% smaller.

"PDK 4.0's integration with Visual Perl 1.2 allows developers to build .NET components in Perl and then use them within VB .NET or C# and do true multilanguage development and debugging," said Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, ActiveState.

"We're adopting Perl as our scripting language of choice because of its crossplatform portability and PDK's functionality is a god-send," said Matt Wagenknecht, Internet Security Engineer, Quantum Corp. "I perform attack and penetration tests on our servers and the smaller footprint of the new PerlApp executables in PDK 4.0 is very important."

Perl Dev Kit's key new features include:

• PerlApp – turns your Perl programs into ready-to-run executables, which can now be built on Win 9x and HP-UX in addition to Linux and Solaris
• PerlCtrl – create ActiveX controls written in Perl, which can now be built on Win 9x
• PerlNET – use existing .NET objects from Perl, create new .NET components in Perl, and inherit from and extend components written in other languages with Perl code

"Based on customer demand we added support for more platforms such as Win 9x and HP-UX," said Jan Dubois, PDK Tech Lead, ActiveState. "We're also very excited about supporting the .NET Framework with its easy interoperability between languages and cross language inheritance. Perl programmers will no longer need to write all that 'plumbing' code that was necessary in the past."

"I've used PDK since the 1.0 release and love the ability to create standalone ActiveX controls," said Dave Warner, Sr. Applications Developer, Northrop Grumann IT Computing Systems. "We run most of our automated functions using Perl and now with PDK 4.0, I can better manage the distribution of standalone executables on our critical HP-UX servers, while maintaining the core distribution on just one server."

The Perl Dev Kit is $195. Existing customers can upgrade for $79.95. Educational, volume and enterprise licenses are also available. Additional details, free trial licenses, and downloads are at ActiveState.com/PDK.

About ActiveState:

ActiveState is the leading provider of open source based programming products and services for cross-platform development. ActiveState's key technologies are Perl, the Internet's most popular programming language; Python and Tcl, user-friendly scripting languages; PHP, the dynamic Web programming language; and XSLT, the XML transformation language.

Media & Analyst Contacts: ActiveState 604.808.6655