Using 64 bit OS for .Net development in VS

Question

My development machine ( 32 bit Windows XP) runs excruciatingly slow when I am doing .Net development in Visual Studio 2008, thanks to the installation of Resharper. So I am thinking about switching my development machine to 64 bit Windows XP.

Not sure whether such a switch will speed up the development or not? 64 bit machines don't have memory problem, so the memory problem with Resharper can be solved by throwing in more and more RAM.

Anyone develops using 64 bit OS? Care to share your experience?

Answer 1

I develop on 64 bit windows 2008 and it works a treat. I don't even know resharper is there.

But then (warning, gratuitous manhood waving ahead) my main dev box has a quad core Xeon 3Ghz with 12Gb RAM and a pair of 15k SAS disks.

I also run three 32bit windows 2003 dev environments simultaneously under Hyper-V, each with 2GB of memory.

Sixty four bit world rocks on a capable chunk of hardware.

Answer 2

64 bit will not solve you memory problem with Resharper 4.0, since Visual Studio 2008 runs as a 32 bit process anyway. Resharper 4.5 will deal with some of the problems, though.

PS: Here's my post on developing under 64 bit: Using Windows Server 2008 64 bit as a development workstation

Answer 3

Just read: Resharper for Dummies. No Really!

Answer 4

Just one hint: Stay away from 64-Bit XP. For Vista and Server 2008, the 64-Bit support in terms of drivers and software is mostly great, but XP64 was never really adopted by the industry and I believe you would regret that step.

That being said, Visual Studio 2008 and Vista 64 with 8 GB RAM = excellent.

Answer 5

I'm working on 64 bit Vista for several months and i must say that you can really feel the difference compared to the 32 bit platform.

Regarding the memory problem - i actually think 64 bit platform will solve the problem since 32 bit processes here are using the full 2G address space which is usually not the case on 32 bit platforms.

Btw, my hardware setup is pretty common (nothing spectacular): Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz with 4GB Ram.

Answer 6

I also develop on 64 bit Windows Vista Ultimate. My box has an ASUS P5K Premium mb (which is excellent, btw), with a 2.67 gigahertz Intel Core2 Quad Q9450 processor, with 8 GB RAM, and 2 TB HD (2 x 1TB RAID 0). My display adapter is a NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT with 512 MB VRAM.

I really don't notice Resharper working. It is so blinding fast that it makes no difference at all.

As of today, I am using the R# 4.5 just for testing. It is faster yet. So far, I found no problems. I ran a large project through it and it worked flawlessly. alas, I am still missing detailed information on the new features that are already implemented in this new version.

Until I buy a Core i7 with 24 GB RAM, I consider this setup ideal for development. It is relatively cheap, readily available, and really fast. Windows Vista 64 is perfect for development.