Using 64-bit machines for CRM development
It seems like a lot of developers are hesitant to install 64-bit OS like Vista or Windows Sever 2008 on their dev. machine. I don’t want to go into driver compatibility issues but want to discuss what it means to write code and build applications for MSCRM on a 64-bit dev. machine. As Ben mentions, I’ve been working on a demo that uses an array of products on top of CRM. I personally took the challenge to build and deploy them all on my 64 bit machine and some on the public CRM 4.0 VPC (which is 32-bit BTW). Overall, I had a wonderful experience and I’m glad that I made the leap to 64-bit for my dev. machine.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with 64 bit architecture, let me just say that the popular AMD x64 architecture can run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. What a relief! Windows basically runs this using a mechanism called Wow64 (Windows on Windows).
In my next few posts, I’ll walk you through my experiment with 64-bit development.
Comments
Anonymous
June 18, 2008
The 64-bit driver compatibility issue is kind of hard to sweep under the rug when you have one or two devices that only supply 32-bit drivers! That is what has personally kept me from running 64-bit...no other hestitation than that. And to be honest, 64-bit is not practical without 4GB+ of RAM...Anonymous
June 18, 2008
tzagotta, I agree that driver compatibility can't be ignored but personally I haven't run into any such issues with my devices. Fearing such situation, I have a 32-bit vista install on a second hard drive hoping to dual-boot on extreme situations. But have never booted in the 32-bit OS for driver compatibility. All of my devices have worked without any issues in 64-bit but yeah, it is YMMV. Still, I strongly feel that it is time to move on. And if a hardware manufacturer doesn't support 64-bit, it doesn't hurt to nudge them a little :-)Anonymous
June 20, 2008
Hey Girish - hope you are enjoying your new office... I couldn't live without 64-bit, and that is especially true for web servers. My development PC as well as my laptop are both 64-bit. Anyways, for 64-bit CRM development, the most important thing is to obtain the latest SDK: version 4.0.5. The bin folder contains the original SDK dlls but also includes new DLLs in the 64-bit subfolder. These new DLLs will work in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. I really love how portable .Net is in supporting both environments. Shan McArthur