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.