Bigger pointers == More traction!!

Start off with a joke... Isn't that what they recommend? This particular joke stems from when Seattle ended up covered in snow this past January and it seemed that for whatever reason the CLR 64bit team were the only people who ended up working in our end of the building... Everyone else was smarter and just took the day off.

Anyway, my name is Josh Williams, I've been working on the 64bit CLR since I joined MS a bit over a year ago (before that I spent a few years working for Intel on various things). Work on the 64bit CLR has been going on however since long before I joined the team, way back to right around when v1.0 was released I believe. Hopefully I can convince a couple other people on the 64bit team to also chime in here from time to time (Thomas, Scott... you know you want to!!).

BradA suggested that I kick this thing off after I contributed a couple comments to a thread on his blog, to which I replied that though I think it an interesting idea the list of things that I think people out there will actually be interested in are fairly small. That original list included:

- Pitfalls of PInvoke when moving to 64bit platforms

- CLR in the WOW64

- GAC on 64bit platforms

- Performance running managed code on 64bit platforms (both in and out of the WOW64)

- Debugging on 64bit (Managed/Native)

- JIT64 and its differences from the x86 JIT

I'll try to get to most of those topics over the next month or two, but hopefully the readers out there can help me out and tell me what they're really interested in learning about the 64bit CLR. BradA has already tried to put out a feeler and so far it seems to show that the people want to hear about WOW64, so I'll aim my next (read: first real) post there!!