Word automation / Office interop / COM DLL

[leodippolito]

Sirs,

I have an ASP.NET application with hundreds of users accessing it. One
of its features is to merge a set of Word documents that are stored in
a server (basically is copy contents from doc1 and append to doc2).

I saw there is a Microsoft Word COM DLL to work with Office documents
from inside C#. However, recently I read this article:

INFO: Considerations for Server-Side Automation of Office
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=257757

So I am confused if I can use this COM DLL in my application. If it's
too risky, what alternatives do I have?

I appreciate any information!

Leo D'Ippolito

 

[Remy Blaettler]

It's just not very stable and since even microsoft is not recommending
it....I guess you get the point.
I use the Aspose Word component, it's about the same price as a license for
word and works pretty well.
Specially their support is great.
Other than that, could you just get word xml or html files and merge them?

 

[Paul Clement]

On 26 Oct 2005 15:00:26 -0700, (e-mail address removed) wrote:

¤
¤ Sirs,
¤
¤ I have an ASP.NET application with hundreds of users accessing it. One
¤ of its features is to merge a set of Word documents that are stored in
¤ a server (basically is copy contents from doc1 and append to doc2).
¤
¤ I saw there is a Microsoft Word COM DLL to work with Office documents
¤ from inside C#. However, recently I read this article:
¤
¤ INFO: Considerations for Server-Side Automation of Office
¤ http://support.microsoft.com/?id=257757
¤
¤ So I am confused if I can use this COM DLL in my application. If it's
¤ too risky, what alternatives do I have?
¤
¤ I appreciate any information!

I'm not really sure which Word COM DLL you are referring to, but the Office applications were not
designed to be automated from clients lacking a user interface nor in environments where multiple
threads of execution are involved. This isn't necessarily true of a COM DLL so I'm assuming that
this is the difference.

Like I said I don't know anything about this Word COM DLL, but if the component interfaces with
Microsoft Word via automation then I would expect issues similar to those when working with the Word
object directly.


Paul
~~~~
Microsoft MVP (Visual Basic)