Visual Studio 2008 64-bit debugging strategy

Question

We are moving to an all-64-bit development environment. Unfortunately VS 2008 and, more importantly, its built-in web server, run in 32-bit mode. When debugging code that references 64-bit assemblies - Oracle.DataAccess, for example - we experience the dreaded System.BadImageFormatException.

Can anyone offer any strategies for debugging code with 64-bit dependencies in VS? I suppose we could use a 32-bit Oracle provider, but we would like to emulate the production environment as closely as possible.

Answer 1

If you use IIS7 you can choose 32/64 bit mode. You will then have to have your projects kick up with IIS instead of cassini which takes a little bit of work, but I think it will solve the problem with Oracle at least. Honestly I don't know how that would all work when attaching at 32bit debugger to it.

Answer 2

We use VMware hosts to give each of our web site developers their own virtual web server. You can use full IIS (as @KevinWon suggested) and install a 64-bit version of the debugger on them. I don't know the specifics of what our guys do - I found this out over a coffee the other day.

Answer 3

I have a similar setup on 64 bit Vista where I have the web site deployed in IIS - this site has in been successfully run and debugged in both 32 and 64 bit.

The biggest problem I have found is working in a mixed environment where some members on the project team are still on 32 bit Windows (both XP and Vista).

This causes headaches with project references to Oracle.DataAccess which I have only managed to solve with bindingRedirect entries in the web.config file in order to point to the correct version of the assembly.

Answer 4

Set up an local IIS on your computer and set it to run in 32bit mode

http://kb.parallels.com/en/2131 If you enable the Debuging mode you can work with it, just like you would with the integrated development server. But you don't have to mess with the 32/64bit assemblies