Determining if an assembly is x64 or x86

After encountering a strange deployment issue today, eventually it was tracked down to an x86 assembly being deployed to a x64 process. There’s a tool included with Visual Studio called corflags that was helpful here. Open up a Visual Studio command prompt, type corflags.exe assemblyname.dll and you’ll see something like this:

Version : v4.0.20926
CLR Header: 2.5
PE : PE32
CorFlags : 11
ILONLY : 1
32BIT : 1
Signed : 1

for a 32 bit assembly, and

Version : v4.0.20926
CLR Header: 2.5
PE : PE32
CorFlags : 9
ILONLY : 1
32BIT : 0
Signed : 1

for a “Any CPU” assembly. There’s more details on everything these fields mean in Brian Peek’s excellent blog post on the topic.