I’ve been enjoying the stability and extra performance of a 64 bit OS for about 2 years now so I am surprise and somewhat disappointed that the latest round of goodness from Microsoft – i.e. SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 have some annoying incompatibilities in this mode.

Datasheet View of  a SharePoint list with a 64 bit version of Office does not work, you just get this annoying dialog:

Apparently this is because the ActiveX control is not available for 64 bit OS’s.  I have only tested on 2008 R2 server – Windows 7 64 bit may be ok.

Also, Intellitrace in Visual Studio – aka Historical Debugging - does not support SharePoint (or any 64 bit app?).

I’m sure Microsoft are aware of these limitations and will offer solutions in due course – but really, 64 bit has been coming for a while and I think we can expect not to see this sort of incompatibility, especially for Office. 

For me this has tarnished my experience only a tad, but overall, 64 bit everywhere is better than 32 bit in the same way that cake is better than two week old bagels.