Team is Going from XP32 to XP64 for .NET Development - Any Gotchas?

Question

My team is getting new XP64 workstations. We\'ve been using XP32 up until now. Most of our work is done in managed C#/VS2008/.net 3.5 and SQL Server 2005. However we do have

Answer 1

It depends.

Have you used P/Invoke in your code?

Have you used unmanaged code and marshalled data to and from it? If so then you will have to go through this code with a fine tooth comb :(.

However if your code is pure C# which hasn't used P/Invoke then the only difference you should see is a slight performance increase and better memory performance :).

You may however run into gremlins finding drivers for your development machines.

If you have some 32bit code then perhaps you could create a WCF interface to it (named pipes are very, very fast) and use that to talk to a 32bit service. I know that you can't have 32bit code in a 64bit process, but I think you can open a pipe to a 32bit process, unless I have that wrong. You could always use TCP/IP in that case. Might save you from rewriting critical code in your system and allow you to use WOW64 or a VM to deal with a migration issue.