How to make System.Data.SQLite.dll work on a 64 bit Windows server

I have a pet project in which I’m using SQLite for persisting day-to-day gasoline prices from various companies. No-one ever thought about that one, right? If this was 2001 I would have at least 20 employees and millions of venture capital already… Luckily this is 2011 and I’m not wasting anybody’s time and money on this one.

Anyway – I’m using SQLite as a persisting mechanism and I had a great deal of trouble making it work. I am for various reasons currently working on a 32 bit Windows 7 laptop and my production server is (luckily) a 64 bit Windows 2008 server. Everything worked fine on my laptop but once I deployed my solution to the server I got various error all evolving around an error message “Unable to load dll SQLite.Interop.dll”.

I thought at first that I just needed to adjust my Visual Studio project settings so all projects in my solution would build as 32 bit. That should work because as they say on MSDN: “If you have 100% type safe managed code then you really can just copy it to the 64-bit platform and run it successfully under the 64-bit CLR”

Short story was: I tried every possible combination of platform targeting, I tried deploying my code with both the 32 bit and 64 bit System.Data.SQLite.dll, I tried just about anything but never made anything work – and I really couldn’t figure out why because it ought to work but didn’t.

After digging for a while I realized that SQLite for .NET is simply a wrapper on top of the original C++ implementation… A few clicks verifying what had to be missing on the server 5 minutes later I had installed the 32bit Visual C++ package and everything started working.

The morale here is: I had a rock-solid idea about SQLite.Net that it wasn’t a wrapper around native code but was SQLite written in pure .NET but never confirmed it by looking it up. I’ve done it before and I’ll probably end up there again in the future but it is always a good idea spending a few minutes learning about the architecture of the tools you’re about to embrace as part of your toolbox. Had I learned from the beginning that there was a C++ assembly hidden somewhere I wouldn’t have spent an entire evening grinding teeth at my computer… Lesson learned this time for sure.