First of all, there’s no 64-bit edition of the Microsoft Jet Engine and it seems never will be. So when I received this error from a user using Vista 64 I panicked…

The ‘Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0’ provider is not registered on the local machine.

Last month I released a dbdesc version for 64-bit OS. It had some third-party libraries (read Firebird) targeting 64-bit.

When you target ‘Any CPU’ in a .NET application your app will be loaded using the “native” platform of the system. In XP/Vista 64 it will be loaded as a 64 bit application, which means that it expects to load 64 libraries. It cannot load a 32 bit-only libraries like the Microsoft Jet Engine. That’s the same reason why I needed to update the Firebird libraries to the 64-bit version and generate a new installer for dbdesc.

The solution is now clear. Dbdesc has to target the x86 platform. This way, I don’t need to use special 64-bit build of any third-party library and the same code will run fine on both 32 and 64 bit OS. For a relative small app like dbdesc, there’s no visible performance loss.

So, dbdesc 3.0.2 is out. This time just one installer; no matter which OS you run.

Great!