R – Vista 64-bit Development Caveats

64-bitdevelopment-environmentvista64windows-vista

I'm migrating my development workstation from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Vista.

The production platform is 32-bit Windows Server and SQL Server 2008.

Does anyone know of any issues with migrating the code base?

EDIT:

the system consists of web forms, c# code, stored procedures.

there is also ajax.net, ssrs, ssis, and dynamic reports/graphs from dundas.

however, i think other users might appreciate any lessons learned or feedback in general regarding this move.

FINDINGS:

As of Jan 24, 2009

  • Checkpoint VPN does not support Vista 64 (actually it seems that very few do)
  • Cropper utility required special download and rebuild to work on Vista 64 (Cropper looks very nice, but it lacks scrollable window capture)

The lack of support for Vista 64 made it not worth while for me. I wish someone would have mentioned the lack of VPN support, but there is currently no vpn vendor that supports 64 bit clients…. So be forwarned – as of 1/28/2009 – using Vista 64 is not a good option for those of us who need vpn.

Best Answer

I have done exactly this - migrated my workstation to Vista 64 whilst still deploying code to 32-bit Win2008 servers.

Generally, your biggest problem will be the WOW64 emulation layer - which means that 32-bit processes and 64-bit processes see different versions of the same resources (registry keys, system folders, and so on.) In .NET, there's an enumeration System.Environment.SpecialFolder which will give you safely abstracted access to Program Files, Application Data and other potentially risky system folders. You'll also need to force IIS to run in 32-bit compatibility mode (it can't run 64-bit and 32-bit web apps simultaneously) - instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894435

There's nothing insurmountable, though - I'm successfully compiling COM-visible .NET assemblies on Vista x64 (setting the compiler to target x86 CPUs), and then deploying them alongside ASP.NET and legacy ASP code running 32-bit COM objects on a 32-bit server, and it's all working very well. There's some notes you might find useful posted on my blog; biggest headache I encountered personally was that 32-bit applications (including my favourite text editor) can't see C:\Windows\System32 any more... but even that's easy enough to work around.

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