Out of Proc COM server + IIS = TROUBLE????

[Gaurav]

hiya,
I wanted to know if anyone thought this was a potential troublesome situation....

I plan to have an ASP page do a Server.CreateObject to instantiate an InProc COM object [DLL].

A function of this DLL now instantiates Excel, which is an Out of Proc COM component [EXE].

So basically its ...

ASP[IIS4.0] -> DLL -> EXE ASP[IIS4.0] -> DLL -> EXE

I hear this is a no no with IIS??? i.e. one shouldn't be having Out of Proc components interacting with IIS?? is this correct? Are there are security implementations?

Can IIS crash frequently as a result of this??

Please note i plan to deploy this in a production environment. the config will be NT 4.0 + IIS 4.0

Any comments would be helpful...

Cheers
Gaurav

[monte96]

True.

You can not use out of process components with IIS. Any Com components must be instantiated in process. However, using one indirectly, may work. What you are describing is using an IP component to interface between IIS and Excel. That sounds to me like it should work.

[Gaurav]

Hiya,
I was wondering WHY can you not use it? what exactly is the issue?

Thanks
Gaurav

[monte96]

Security of the server. The IIS service process will only interact with in process components by default. The reasoning is that not all executables are safe to execute on the server AND (more importantly) each instance is a separate process with it's own memory usage. Imagine 1000 ppl logging onto the server and running the same out of process exe. The server runs out of memory and grinds to a halt.

There are ways around it if that was not discouraging enough for you though.. check out this from MSDN