Visual C# 2008 Express and 32/64-bit

Thought I'd start this blog off by posting a fix to an issue I recently ran into when attempting to learn Managed DirectX. By default, Visual C# 2008 Express generates code for "Any CPU". This is normally alright except when trying to develop for Managed DirectX which only supports 32-bit.

So I did a quick search on Google and found mention of an option in the "Build" menu in the project manager that you use to set which platform you compile for. Problem is, Visual C# 2008 Express seems to be lacking this. So I did another search on Google and came across a solution someone had found that dealt with this problem. However as I prefer to do things through the IDE than by editing a file which could very well end up getting automatically modified by the same IDE later on, I decided to look into an alternative.

It turned out to be easier than I expected. First, you have to open up Options by clicking Tool->Options. Once that's open enable the option labeled "Show all settings".

Next click the newly appeared "Projects and Solutions" and then click the "Show advanced build configurations" option.

After clicking OK the options next to the Run button on the toolbar should now be enabled. Click the one labeled "Any CPU" and select "Configuration Manager...".

The configuration manager will open. Under "Platform", open the combo box and select "New...".

Another dialog box will open with an option to select the platform you wish to use. Since we want 32-bit, we'll select x86. Now click "OK" and the next time you build the project it should compile as 32-bit. Of course since this only affects the current project you'll either have to do this everytime or create a template (by clicking File->Export Template).