An open letter to sanity: Please have mercy on our souls

In an ongoing series of challenges with WSS 3.0, and SharePoint in general, I present one frustrating ordeal I face planted in yesterday.

I've got a WSS test environment installed on an x64 box, and it's running just fine. With the release of VS2008, I also installed that on the same box, to do some on-site testing. VS2008 is also, of course, behaving well. Combined, however, x64 + WSS + VS9 proved to be ... tiresome. I started a new web project in VS9; referenced the WSS assemblies from the Web Server Extensions\12 dir; added a few lines of source to connect to the local WSS site; then hit compile. Kablammo! "Attempted to load a 64-bit assembly on a 32-bit platform. Use ReflectionOnlyLoad() instead if trying to load for reflection purposes."

Ok, so apparently there's no x64 WebDev.WebServer.exe. Fine, I'll just copy the x86 WSS binaries from some other test box I've got. Again, no compilation errors, and this time the web site was actually loading... For a second. Kablammo! "FileNotFoundException. The Web application at http://localhost could not be found. Verify that you have typed the URL correctly. If the URL should be serving existing content, the system administrator may need to add a new request URL mapping to the intended application."

"Ehm, well, uh..."

[30 minutes of frenetic, though effortless, searching]

"Sigh..."

So I gave up, and setup a quick site in the local IIS, and connected VS9 to that instead. After adding the same code, and referencing the x64 assemblies: success!