Some time ago, I moved my blog to a 64-bit X64 server. This server was running Windows Server 2003 SP1 Beta 1 and an early version of Whidbey Beta 2. I thought that this was an excellent opportunity to dogfood (MS term for early adoption) the 64-bit version of the framework, not to mention Server 2003 SP1. Another side aspect of this exercise was that I was testing out the backwards compatibility of the .NET Framework, since DasBlog is built with the v1.1 version of the Framework.

I'm happy to report that I've had zero problems with this new configuration, even with beta software. The OS has now shipped, so there is no issue there, but the version of Whidbey is still only Beta 2 and it is chugging day after day without issue. Doesn't get better than that! It also shows the incredible value of MSIL -- what C#, VB.Net, Eiffel, IronPython, Cobol and any other managed code compiler compiles down to -- given that the Everett DasBlog code "just works" on 64-bit Whidbey, even though 64-bit was not a supported (or possible) configuration of Everett.

One of the major features of Whidbey ASP.Net is XHTML compliance. DasBlog was not designed to be 100% XHTML compliant, so would not work on the first try on Whidbey. We had to use a special config switch to turn off XHTML compliance in Whidbey. After that, everything worked perfectly, in terms of performance, backwards compatibility and general behaviour of the app. I'm very happy and can say that Whidbey Beta 2 is ready for prime-time development. To that end, the .NET Framework is allowing companies to "go live" with our "go live" license. This means that you can build/migrate a public-facing application with Whidbey Beta 2.

Back to 64-bit ... I must say that the 64-bit support in Whidbey is very cool. I have two high-end X64 boxes in my office, one from Intel and the other from AMD. I use them for various purposes and am quite happy with them. In particular, I really like building and debugging apps on my 64-bit machines, having them run in native 64-bit, but then being able to deploy them to both 32- and 64-bit machines. The portability of managed code assemblies across different CPU architectures (IA64, X64, X86) is a huge win.

I've also been running early 64-bit versions of Longhorn on these two X64 machines. I haven't done any tests using >2GB of virtual address space, but I would like to see a managed app that does that, taking full advantage of the 64-bit address space. I can imagine that companies running SQL Server will immediately see the benefit of that removed barrier.