With all the talk about Microsoft® .NET, it's easy to forget that another major new technology is coming to Windows® as well. I'm talking about 64-bit programming on Intel's IA-64 series of CPUs. In my next two columns, I'll look at the details of IA-64 parameter passing, stack frames, and return values. Don't worry if you haven't had the time to study the IA-64 architecture yet. You won't need to know all the gory details for what I'll be talking about, and I'll introduce just enough of the CPU basics to get you through.
