Console App Platform always "Active(x86)"

Question

If I go to project properties of a C# Console Application, its Platform is always set to Active(x86) where Platform target is x64, as shown in the img:

Can somebody tell what's the difference and how to create an app whose Platform is x64.

Answer 1

Microsoft made a couple of drastic design mistakes in VS2010, this is one of them. The Platform name for managed projects always used to be "AnyCPU". It is again in V2012 and up. But the default name in VS2010 is "x86".

That was a horrible choice, given that the Platform name is completely irrelevant to a managed project. Managed code runs on any platform, it is the Just-In-Time compiler that automatically converts the MSIL that the compiler generates to machine code. At runtime, not build time. So "AnyCPU" is a much more descriptive name, the jitter truly does make it run on "any cpu".

This momentary lapse of good thinking was induced by a significant change in the C++ project build model. VS2010 is the first version of Visual Studio where C and C++ projects are built with MSBuild instead of the custom build engine (VCBuild) used in previous versions. The Project selection is a Really Big deal for such projects, it selects the compiler that's used to compile the source code. Different cpus require different compilers because C++ code is directly translated into machine code.

So just ignore this, the name just doesn't matter. And above all, it has no effect at all on what the jitter does. Which requires a different setting if you want to force it to only generate 32-bit code. You found the setting that does that.