What does the Visual Studio “Any CPU” target mean?

Question

I have some confusion related to the .NET platform build options in Visual Studio 2008.

What is the "Any CPU" compilation target, and what sort of files does it generate? I examined the output executable of this "Any CPU" build and found that they are the x86 executables (who would not see that coming!). So, is there any the difference between targeting executable to x86 vs "Any CPU"?

Another thing that I noticed, is that managed C++ projects do not have this platform as an option. Why is that? Does that mean that my suspicion about "Any CPU" executables being plain 32-bit ones is right?

Answer 1

Check out the article Visual Studio .NET Platform Target Explained.

The default setting, "Any CPU", means that the assembly will run natively on the CPU it is currently running on. Meaning, it will run as 64-bit on a 64-bit machine and 32-bit on a 32-bit machine. If the assembly is called from a 64-bit application, it will perform as a 64-bit assembly and so on.

The above link has been reported to be broken, so here is another article with a similar explanation: What AnyCPU Really Means As Of .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 11

Answer 2

Any CPU means that it will work on any platform. This is because managed code is similar to Java. Think of it as being compiled to a byte code that is interpreted by the .NET Framework at run-time.

C++ does not have this option because it is compiled to machine code that is platform specific.