digitalBush

I read this post from Ted Dziuba and got a chuckle.  After laughing for a bit, I started thinking about my recent pains in making the switch to 64 bitness.

I recently got the opportunity to upgrade development machines at work.  Finally, I was able to free myself from a 4-year old handed down laptop from the CEO!  Nothing short of a quad core machine would do.  While I'm at it, why not throw 4 gigs of memory in there and go to town.  Going 64 bit became a must if I was going to make use of the entire 4 gigs.

In the past, I had heard horror stories of driver issues involved with going x64.  Knowing what I might be getting into, I was pleasantly surprised when the install of Vista went off without a hitch.  More importantly, all of the drivers installed without issue.  Sweet!

Being in my x86 world, I never had to think about the ramifications of leaving the default platform target to "Any CPU".  Once you venture into x64 land, strange things will happen.  My favorite Visual Studio feature, Edit and Continue, won't work when the app is running 64-bit.  Oledb connections to csv files won't work for me unless I'm running 32-bit.  Also, every once in a while an app I'm debugging will just kill over unexpectedly.  100% of the time I can fix any kind of weird unexplained issue I'm having can be fixed just by switching the platform target to x86.

With all of that said, I'm still very happy with the performance of my system.  It's not a big deal to change the default platform target.  Eventually all of these wrinkles will be ironed out and 32-bit systems will be a thing of the past.  It might take a while, but at least I'm helping move in that direction.