I just recieved a new development machine from IT and it has Windows Vista 64 on it. I was wondering if there is a drawback to developing, and sometimes building, 32-bit and 64-bit installs on a 64-bit system.
Should I install a 32-bit OS? Is there anything that I won't be able to do in InstallShield on a 64-bit system that I could do on a 32-bit system, or vice-versa?
Thank you for you help. The reason I asked is that I remember reading somewhere that you could not do COM extraction for a 64-Bit install on a 32-Bit system. I was not sure if the reverse was also true.
As I'm sure you probably already know, the way we do COM extraction is to load the PE file, call the DllRegisterServer entrypoint (or /REGSERVER command line in the case of an EXE) and capture the COM data that gets written to the registry (in a redirected location). The problem on 32-bit systems is that you can't load 64-bit .dlls period. So, 64-bit COM extraction is not possible on 32-bit systems. The opposite, however, is no true because you can load 32-bit PEs on 64-bit systems.
