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I'm aware that it's not possible to load a 32-bit DLL into a 64-bit process. The DLL in question is a ODBC driver which is no longer supported (although it works fine) and no 64-bit version of it exists. I don't have access to the source code either.

There doesn't seem to be an off-the-shelf way of "thunking" between the two architectures - the only option I can think of is to write a 32-bit COM object and get it to wrap the 32-bit DLL, and then also write a 64-bit DLL which exposes the same API the 32-bit DLL exposes and then bridge the gap by serializing the parameters to the API call and utilising DCOM's data marshalling functionality to get across the 32-bit / 64-bit boundary. This is a pretty tedious approach though and it could be quite slow if the interface is "chatty".

So what I'm wondering is if there are any other ways of solving this problem?

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    or a second background process that loads the 32 bit dll and communicates with the 64 bit process Commented May 19, 2014 at 17:04
  • Do you have access to the code for the 64-bit application? Can you just build that one as 32-bit? Commented May 19, 2014 at 18:22
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    This question already has an answer on SO: stackoverflow.com/questions/128445/… Commented May 20, 2014 at 7:58
  • Hi, thanks for the replies. I don't have access to the 64-bit app's source code either. The main scenario I'm dealing with by the way is 64-bit SQL Server trying to setup a linked server (via sp_addlinkedserver) to another database via it's 32-bit ODBC driver. It's a shame that all that plumbing code has to be written by hand :( Commented May 20, 2014 at 10:38

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