This article talks about the Microsoft release story for 64-bit.  Note that they use one of our blogs as a source...something we see becoming more common.  Whidbey (the 2005 line of products for Visual C++ and Visual Studio) will include cross and native 64-bit toolsets for both Itanium and x64.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1770386,00.asp

april