Is it possible for a Asp.Net developer on 64-bit windows to work with a team that has 32-bit?

Question

Are there any compatibility issues that would prevent this from working? Do I need to have a 32-bit VM to use when working on projects for this team?

Answer 1

No. Should work perfectly well.

Read a little here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973190.aspx

Answer 2

I run Vista 64 and the other members of my team run XP 32 bits, the only issue we've had so far was with a third party COM-component where the interop assembly wasn't easy to generate on the 64 bit machine. Once it was generated it screwed up the other machines. That was fixed by generating the interop assembly on the 32-bit machines and checking it into source control.

I heard in the latest .Net-rocks podcast that setting x86 instead of "Any CPU" in the build configuration should resolve a lot of problems, but since I haven't had any problems other than the one I described I have not yet tried that.

Answer 3

It doesn't matter what your environment is, develop on whatever machine you wish. I would be concerned about the QA, staging and production environments. If they are all 32 bit, I would want a 32 bit VM to test my code.

Answer 4

I'm not sure about collaborating with other developers in a different windows 32/64-bit environment, but I can speak about deploying an .NET application that was developed in Windows XP 32-bit on a Windows 2008 64-bit server.

The only problem I had was with an application that relied on a 3rd-party assembly. We only had a 32-bit version of the assembly. So, in order to run our application in a 64-bit environment, I had to compile my project for x86 (as you described). It solved everything.

All other applications I was able to get running without changing a thing (they were compiled in the 'Any CPU' mode.

I suspect you won't have problem unless you have some external assemblies. If that's the case, then you will either have to recompile them or simple force your project to compile to x86.

I know that doesn't definitely answer you question, but hopefully it helps.

Andrew