Lets go develop on 64 bit!

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Over the last few months I have made the move to 64 bit – Windows 7 RTM on my laptop and Windows 2008 standard server with hyper-v on my dev box.

I’m also running 64 bit Office 2010 and a number of other 64 bit goodies. But it is in the area of development I’m really having ‘fun’.

So first off it was time to setup a 64 bit dev image:

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Std (64 bit)
2. SQL Server 2008 (64 bit)
3. Visual Studio 2008 (32 bit only)
4. BizTalk 2009 Developer Edition (64 bit)
5. Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 (64 bit)
6. Office 2007 (32 bit only)

So the ‘fun’ is that not is all as it seems!!! Initial problems occurred during following the BizTalk install. In fact during the BizTalk configuration and in particularly configuring the BizTalk BAM Portal.

The process completed with a number of failures: of most interest here was the BAM Portal.

What I discovered is provided the understanding of my issues:

1. The configuration wizard is a 32-bit process; therefore it requires certain components which allow it to communicate with 64-bit SQL Server.
2. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) portal components must run in IIS using 32-bit ASP.NET 3.5. BAM Portal will run on 64-bit hardware in WOW mode.

Now the first challenge was what the hell is WOW mode. Turns out it is WOW64 and this stands for Windows(32) on Windows64 (note it should be W32OW64 but not quite as catchy).

So for BAM we must be running Internet Information Services (IIS) 6 in a 64-bit environment and therefore set IIS to 32-bit mode to run the BAM portal.

This means when we installed IIS we also needed to install the IIS6 Compatibility pack.

To check:

1. Run Server Manager
2. Select Roles
3. Select Web Server (IIS)
4. Scroll right panel until the configuration display is shown (see diagram below)
5. Check for IIS 6 Management Compatibility and see if it says it is installed.
6. If not installed, click Add Role Services on right of screen.  Select the IIS 6 Management Compatibility and install.

Having completed that bit we now need to get it into WOW64 mode!!

To set a 64-bit mode IIS installation to 32-bit mode:

1. Open a command prompt and run the adsutil command. To do this, click Start, click Run, and then type cmd.

2. Type the following at the command prompt: cscript c:\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1.

3. Close the command prompt.

After all that you’ll find that the BAM portal will now configure. This of course has left me with a new problem typified by the following screen:

It seems that the EDI/AS2 install also has various 32 bit dependencies but more of that another day!!

The other thing misconception that this 64 bit exercise has now dispelled is that the BAM Portal does not use WSS 3.0 (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0) as I had thought before!! It is just a pure ASP.net portal.

Other issues I now have are centred around WSS 3.0 64 bit – haven’t managed to get it to run yet, and of course the BizTalk SharePoint Adapter.

Finally some more factoids around this 64 bit adventure:

Adapter support figure

By default, all adapters can run in 32-bit mode on 32-bit Windows and on WOW64 on 64-bit Windows. The following adapters can run in native 64-bit mode (in either IIS or BTSNTSVC as the host process):

• HTTP
• SOAP
• File
• SMTP
• MSMQ
• MQSeries
• WCF