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What is the best approach to developing a web application in Visual Studio 2010 on Windows XP 32 bit (no choice, corporate mandate) that uses the Oracle Data Provider for .NET (11.2 Release 3) but is targeting a Windows Server 2008 64 bit OS? How do programmatically switch between the 32 bit and 64 bit driver or can this be handled another way?

Update: I've created a new question about 64 bit development on 32 bit OS with an unmanaged 64bit dll reference.

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Josh
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    @Chris, it is a large company and unfortunately there aren't plans for a upgrading. – Josh May 06 '11 at 14:52

2 Answers2

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I guess you are referring to Oracle's .NET library to access Oracle databases with the term ODP.NET, the Oracle Data Provider for .NET.

Developing since 2 years on various ASP.NET projects with an Oracle database as the backend, I can tell some of our experiences.

We tried hard to get a 64-bit version of ODP.NET working, both on the development machines (W7 64 bit) and the productive machines (W2K8R2, 64 bit).

Unfortunately, this was never stable/working. We ended with a 32-bit ODP.NET installation, switching the appropriate IIS 7.5 application pools to 32-bit mode.

Uwe Keim
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    Correct, I'll update the question to refer to the provider for .Net. Have you tried the 64 bit version for 11g Release 3? – Josh May 06 '11 at 13:48
  • @Josh. We virtually tried all different ODP.NET versions, including beta versions and older versions, 32-bit and 64-bit versions. It was a _real_ mess just to find out that it a) is not compiling b) is not running or c) is running but some queries generate internal errors. We wasted a _lot_ of time on these things, including the rewrite of several SQL queries to not fail. Our current solution works, we will never ever switch to another ODP.NET version :-). – Uwe Keim May 06 '11 at 13:54
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    So we are left we two choices, we can go with the Microsoft Oracle provider which they are not supporting after .Net 4.0, or go with ODP.NET but limit the web application to run in 32 bit mode in IIS. – Josh May 06 '11 at 14:29
  • @Josh Do you really see any disadvantages running IIS in 32 bit mode? We didn't, but on the other hand, we are not _the_ IIS experts. – Uwe Keim May 06 '11 at 14:41
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    Performance increase, and supporting more than 4GB of memory. – Josh May 06 '11 at 14:49
  • @Josh - I would doubt that performance thing ;-) I rather think it will _decrease_ performance. [See also this SO question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723038/running-32bit-net-application-in-64bit-os-is-it-really-bad). – Uwe Keim May 06 '11 at 15:15
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Inform your company on the risks of developing on 32bit machines that are very disparate between your 64bit production environments.

You should not be developing on 32bit machines, your employer should provide you with adequate resources to do your job.

Having a development environment that is respective enough of your production system is an absolute requirement to success.

Edit: If you receive extensive pushback on this, acknowledge that the hard requirement for this is that Oracle is unable to and/or unwilling to create managed software interfaces that allow access to their database independent of the platform and that this is part of the associated costs for being an Oracle user.

Chris Marisic
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