So today I started staging FS2008 on our development server only to start getting BadImageFormatException errors. A little probing around with corflags shows that all of the DLLs now have the 32-bit flag set, and are therefore unable to run in a 64-bit application pool under x64 Windows. Of course, our website has been running 64-bit for quite a while now and we aren't going back. Because we've integrated FS functionality into the site, trying to isolate the application is not feasable.
So why the change? And why wasn't this at least disclosed in the release notes? Or was x64 never really supported?
I suspect this has to do with the inclusion of the new IBM ICU (and VC runtime) DLLs, but I do not see any mention of this in the release notes either. I tried to run a quick analysis of the managed DLLs, and there appears to be very little P/Invoke at all, and I didn't see anything that references those new DLLs. (My analysis could surely be incomplete.)
I found that FCKeditorV2.dll depends on msvcrt.dll. This should be handled fine since both x32 and x64 versions are included in the OS, and the WOW subsystem should sort everything out for you.
I also see that the Helpers DLL has a reference to spssio32.dll, and it's like that in the current version. I don't see that a 64-bit version of this DLL exists, so there is probably no workaround, except to perhaps just not show that option in an x64 application pool. I don't use SPSS export, so apparently I've just never encountered the inevitable crash!
So I guess my question is, what is the full extent of 32-bit dependencies in the 2008 version? Is there any 64-bit plan?
I can probably use some tools to unsign the assemblies and remove the 32-bit flag, but don't want to find that there is some other issue!
Joel