Force x86 CLR on 'Any CPU' .NET assembly

Posted by jeffora on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by jeffora
Published on 2009-10-02T00:56:00Z Indexed on 2010/03/15 20:09 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 594

Filed under:

c#

|

64bit

|

injection

|

clr

In .NET, the 'Platform Target: Any CPU' compiler option allows a .NET assembly to run as 64bit on a x64 machine, and 32bit on an x86 machine. It is also possible to force an assembly to run as x86 on an x64 machine using the 'Platform Target: x86' compiler option.

Is it possible to run an assembly with the 'Any CPU' flag, but determine whether it should be run in the x86 or x64 CLR? Normally this decision is made by the CLR/OS Loader (as is my understanding) based on the bitness of the underlying system.

I am trying to write a C# .NET application that can interact with (read: inject code into) other running processes. x64 processes can only inject into other x64 processes, and the same with x86. Ideally, I would like to take advantage of JIT compilation and the Any CPU option to allow a single application to be used to inject into either x64 or x86 processes (on an x64 machine).

The idea is that the application would be compiled as Any CPU. On an x64 machine it would run as x64. If the target process is x86, it should relaunch itself, forcing the CLR to run it as x86. Is this possible?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about 64bit

How do I install Geomatica?

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I wanted to try the latest version(trial) of Geomatica, Geomatica 2012 on Ubuntu 11.10 beta. When I tried to run the bin file I got a whole list of dependencies. It also seems that it is a RPM package. Instead of going through each entry manually, is there any easy way to search and install a list… >>> More
Java 64bit install throwing non compatible 64bit error in 64bit Windows 7

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
JRE and JDK 64bit install executable are throwing a non compatible win32 error: jre_7u1_windows-x64bit.exe is not a valid Win32 application. I thought this could be a system environment variable problem, but from what I can tell it is not, the variable PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE is set as: AMD64 and… >>> More
ColdFusion 9 64bit / MAMP Pro 1.9 64Bit on OSX

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I followed this thread and it's associated links. But there is nothing i can do to get CF9 to work. MAMP Pro now has the 64bit version of apache 2.2. Whenever i start apache i get an error saying it couldn't start and to check the logs. i check the logs and this is what i see. 6/1/10 12:39:12 PM… >>> More
Using Toad with 64bit Oracle Client and Windows 7 64bit Operating System

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
After downloading the latest version of Toad for Windows 7 64bit, I am struggling to get it to connect to the database using the existing full Oracle Client that is already on the desktop. The Oracle Client that is there is a 64bit version and is version 12c. When running Toad it says that there is… >>> More
how to find if the machine is 32bit or 64bit

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Is there anyway from a C prog to find whether the OS is currently running in 32bit or 64bit mode. I am using a simple program as below int main(void){ switch(sizeof(void*)){ case 4: printf("32\n"); break; case 8: printf("64\n"); break; } } Is this a correct… >>> More