64 bit application needs to shell Microsoft.VisualStudio.SourceSafe.Interop as 32 bit process

Question

I have an application that downloads a project from Visual SourceSafe, checks out the last executable, compiles the app and checks in the executable. The application works fine on Windows 7 64-bit OS with a 32-bit version of Excel installed but must be run on Windows Server 2008 R2 to actually build the code in question.

My problems is that the application uses a spreadsheet as a database and the server has the 64-bit access database engine installed.

This leads to a big problem in that the Microsoft.VisualStudio.SourceSafe.Interop is only a 32 bit process and the spreadsheet can only be opened using a 64-bit driver.

I am looking to shim the 32-bit Visual Studio processes but cannot find an example of how to do this within a .NET assembly.

I even tried to create a separate class library in the hope that the 64 bit application could call a 32 bit class library but it cannot.

Any tips and examples would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The only way that we could get around this limitation was to setup a 32-bit OS and make everything run as 32-bit.