How to make Visual Studio use the native amd64 toolchain

Question

How can I get Visual Studio 2012 to use the native amd64 toolchain, rather than the default x86_amd64 cross-compiler?

I am building a large library that causes the l

Answer 1

You need to set the environment variable "_IsNativeEnvironment" to "true" prior to starting Visual Studio 2012 IDE:

set _IsNativeEnvironment=true
start "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" your_solution.sln

For Visual Studio 2013, the name of the environment variable is different:

set PreferredToolArchitecture=x64
sbm start "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" your_solution.sln

Beware that this technique does not work if the version of the IDE does not match the version of the toolchain. That is, if you use VS2013 IDE configured to run VS2012 compiler, you are out of luck. But such combination is uncommon.

Here are some links for further information:

difference between VS12 and VS13

how to embed PreferredToolArchitecture into the project in VS13