Using Visual Studio 2005 (32bit) on a Windows 7 64bit machine.

Question

I need to use Visual Studio 2005 (C++) on my new laptop - a Sony Vaio with Windows 7 64bit..

I don't need to develop for a 64bit environment, my work is all 32bit, so how can I be sure that I can still develop/debug/test for a 32bit target environment using VS2005 on a 64bit machine....?

What's the best option:

1) Just install VS2005 on Windows 7 64bit and carry on.. (suspect problems with 64bit runtime libs..?)

2) Dual boot the laptop with Windows XP 32bit.

3) Run some kind of Virtual Machine with Windows XP in it... (I don't have a VM yet, but would look into it)

Thanks

Answer 1

The answer is 1) you just need to make sure that you target processor is 32bit. You can develop for 32bit machine on a 64bit machine and vice versa.

After some looking around it looks like you must have up to date service packs. Read http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948853.aspx if you want to know more.

Answer 2

Visual Studio includes both 32-bit and 64-bit compilers and tools.

You can install VS on Windows 7 x64 and develop 32-bit applications without any problems.
(Just don't do something insane like hard-coding "C:\\Program File (x86)\\")

Answer 3

As the others have pointed out, both the 64 bit and 32 bit versions of VS can target both 64 bit and 32 bit runtime environments. Further you can use either the 64 or 32 bit versions of Windows 7 (obviously the 64 bit version of VS requires 64 bit Windows, but VS 32 bit runs on either).

But you have a second part to your question, debug/test on 32 bit. Depending on the kinds of applications you build, testing under Windows 7 64 bit alone may not be sufficient. You may want to test in a Windows XP virtual machine running under Windows 7, or in certain cases you may need a real 32 bit computer to test on.