title: What is the purpose of setting the platform target for a Visual Studio application?
body: <p>For any VS project it is possible to set the platform target in the build properties of that project. You can set this to Any CPU, x86, x64 or Itanium.  My question is, if I set this value to x86 does that mean I cannot run that project on a x64 machine?  If so, why is this even used?  Is it not better to just always use Any CPU?</p>