Hi Everyone!

Today I am releasing an updated version of Pandora Desktop. It doesn't have any feature changes, but it does now work on 64-bit versions of Windows. 64-bit versions of Windows ship with both a 32-bit version and 64-bit version of Internet Explorer. The 64-bit version is basically useless though, as there are very few plugins available on the internet that support 64-bit browsers. Flash player is not one of them, and that's where the problem occurred. In order for Pandora Desktop to function, it needs the Flash plugin working properly, and by default, .NET applications that use the Internet Explorer control run in true 64-bit mode. There is a way to compile .NET applications to target a specific platform, i.e. x86 or x64, but you need to be running a full version of Visual Studio. Since I don't make any money from my applications, I write everything in the free Visual Studio Express, which doesn't allow you to target a specific platform. Alas, there was a solution, and a fairly easy solution at that, and I was able to implement the solution to release a 64-bit version of Pandora Desktop. I am already getting into too many technical details for this blog post, but if you want to know more, feel free to post a comment and I will post more details there.

As always, you can download Pandora Desktop from the application details page, or click here for a direct download. Have fun rocking out!

Update: I have discovered that the latest version fails to launch after updating. A file is missing from the installer called settings.txt which needs to be placed in the same directory as the application, usually C:Program FilesPandora Desktop. The file can be blank and the application will start properly, but until that file exists, it crashes at start up. There will be a fix posted to the site later today (2011-01-28), but if you want to get the application working immediately, just right click in the Pandora Desktop folder and create a new Text Document and name it settings.txt. Sorry for the inconvenience this problem has caused.

Update 2: The new installer includes the proper file and should work fine now. You can either reinstall over the top of the previous version, or uninstall and reinstall the latest version.

PS: I now have Windows 7, so I will be working on updating all my applications to work properly under Windows 7, including all the security changes that currently require most of my apps to run in Administrator mode.