Integrating Legacy Windows app with ASP.Net app

[John Stockton]

Ok, I have a funky situation here. The client has an existing windows
application that they want exposed via their c# asp.Net application. The
windows app is not .Net based and we do not have the source code for it.

Their thought is to have the app running on the web server and essientally
screen-scrape it two-ways (data in and data out) on their web app. They want
to recreate the basic field layout (even including tab-order) on the web
page and then have the submitted data submitted to the windows app. All of
this done on the fly of course.

Now, I've been in Web development for a number of years but have never heard
of anything like this working. The reason behind this is the windows app is
known and liked in the target community and would take too long to recreate
each screen (300+ pages).

Any advice anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Guest]

I would try and see if any API's have been exposed so that you could use
pinvoke or see if any COM classes have been written for the older app. If
there are, then you could use pinvoke or COM interop to "interact" with the
non-.net app.

 

[Bruce Barker]

tell your client its the wrong approach. anyway here are some of the issues:

the basic logic would be to start the screen app, and send keystokes to it.
to do this reliably, I pick up a windows screen testing api (will have code
to help determine the page, detect popups etc). each web user will have to
have their own instance of the app running (does it support
multi-instances?). on session start you need to create an instance (as
asp.net cannot start a windows app you will need a techinque for this.) also
thiese must be an active desktop on the server - logged in account, to
support the windows app. on session end - close the window app assoicated
with the session.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)