.NET 2.0 and AZman on Itanium platform

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If you ever had doubts about running your .NET 2.0 application on ITANIUM 64-bit platforms you can rest assured. I was almost surprised that having an ASP.NET 2.0 website with quite a lot of compiled .NET 2.0 DLLs I am able to take the build straight from x86 development environment and deploy it w/o any issues on an IA-64 IIS box. All you need is the IA-64 .NET framework. Itanium is now quite in the shadow of x64 architecture (a.k.a.AMD64) and beginning to be considered quite exotic, but there is still some number of IA-64 servers out there.

I had some doubts about running the application, and was anxious to see if it would need recompilation as ONLY team system edition of VS2005 has an explicit option to compile against Itanium (https://blogs.msdn.com/deeptanshuv/archive/2006/04/11/573795.aspx). It turned out that this is not needed and the default compilation is enough – the framework takes care of translating the .NET binaries to machine code.

Another thing is that .NET 2.0 on Itanium does not have any problems with connecting to SQL 2005, which it had for 1.1 and SQL 2000.

The only moment were you would need recompilation is if you use C++ instead of C# (or any other .NET managed code). And then VS 2005 Team System edition is needed (https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hs24szh9.aspx).

The last thing you may have problems with find information about is that you CAN use AZman (Authorization Manager) on IA-64 platform.

Note that Windows Server does have Azroles.dll on Ia64 by default – this is in fact a COM interface. If you want to utilize AZman roles and classes in managed code, then you need the interop assembly (called PIA-primary interop assembly) which is not on IA64/x64 machines by default. You can get the PIA from x86 or from the win2k download package: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7edde11f-bcea-4773-a292-84525f23baf7&DisplayLang=en.

There is no common installation package for Win2k3, but you can use the above one on Ia64 and X64 machines. All it does is to map the managed code APIs to the COM interfaces.