How to the designer as 32bit application

LLBLGen Pro's designer is a .NET 4.7.2 application and compiled against .NET 4.7.2, and with the compiler directive AnyCPU which means that if you run the designer on a 32bit Windows installation it will be a 32bit application, but when you run it on a 64bit Windows installation it will be a native 64bit application.

In some cases you might need to run the designer explicitly as a 32bit application on 64bit windows. The following sub-sections describe how to do this.

When to start the designer explicitly as 32bit

You need to run the designer as 32bit on 64bit Windows if you want to use a 32bit only ADO.NET provider or OleDb driver. For example using MS Access as the target database does require the designer to be a 32bit application if you have to use the older '.mdb' compatible OleDb driver.

If you use Office 2010+ compatible .accdb MS Access files, you likely have the MS ACE driver installed which is 64bit compatible. Also when you're using ODP.NET for Oracle and have installed the 32bit variant, you have to run the designer as 32bit application otherwise the ODP.NET compatible driver won't be able to connect to the database.

Running the designer as 32bit application on 64bit Windows

To run the designer as 32bit application on 64bit windows, you have to execute the application LLBLGenPro_x86.exe, which is located in the LLBLGen Pro installation folder. This application is a small 32bit application which will run the normal designer .exe as a contained process and therefore will enforce Windows to see it as a 32bit application. A shortcut is added to the start menu of Windows to make this easier.