Forcing 32-Bit versus Any CPU

I've been working on a 64-bit platform now for about 3 months and while most commercial software has no problems running on it either in 32-bit mode or native 64-bit, open source projects are another story.

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Many .NET open source projects use the default settings in the Build tab of a VS2005 project of “Any CPU” for the Platform Target attribute. I am not sure why this doesn’t work or what other underlying problems may be causing “Any CPU” not to work on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors, but I have found that if I get the source for the project and force the Platform Target to be x86, then the resulting binaries work equally well on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

Tags: vs2005, default target, any cpu, 64bit