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TIMOTHY_MANGAN's avatar
TIMOTHY_MANGAN
MVP
Aug 30, 2018

The trouble with "bitness" (aka architecture) and shiming.

I want to highlight an issue with implementing PSF shimming that I ran into.  It was particularly annoying because the symptoms did not match the real problem.   The issue is the need for alignment...
SteveThomas's avatar
SteveThomas
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jan 24, 2019

Good points. However, all commercial apps that I've seen where the releases yielded x86, x64, and AnyCPU build did just that - made all three platforms available (or bitness - I like that word too.) 

 

If AnyCPU is problematic with the PSF shim launcher, why not package with the x86 or x64 build?

  • Tim Mangan's avatar
    Tim Mangan
    MVP
    Jan 24, 2019

    Yes - "bitness" describes it quite well.

     

    If you are building an installer, you can include all components.  But if you are an IT pro repackaging with "the tool", the installer only puts down the bitness specific bits associated with the OS you capture on.

     

    Given that we are capturing and deploying to Windows 10 - this isn't much of an issue because nobody uses the 32-bit version of the OS (well, except in VMs where memory matters I suppose).

     

    It sounds like the PSF components actually handle more of this automatically than I thought - making sure they insert the right bitness shims if we supply them. But until I can test real-world scenarios on this I'll hold on making a final judgement.

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