Running a 32-bit IIS application in Windows Azure

Up there, everything is 64 bits. By design.

What to do if you have 32-bit machines locally – erm, sorry: on-premise – and want to move your existing applications, let’s say web applications, to Windows Azure?

For this scenario you need to enable 32-bit support in (full) IIS in your web role. The following is a startup task script that enables 32-bit applications in IIS settings by using appcmd.exe.

enable32bit.cmd:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:applicationPools
-applicationPoolDefaults.enable32BitAppOnWin64:true

And this is the necessary startup task defined in the service definition file:

ServiceDefinition.csdef:

<Startup>
   <Task commandLine="enable32bit.cmd" executionContext="elevated" taskType="simple" />
</Startup>

Hope this helps.