Re: Using .Net assemblies with PHP

On 5/17/2011 1:44 PM, Richard Quadling wrote:

It would be really useful to know what isn't working? I don't use any .NET stuff, but I do use COM to talk to MS Word and Excel as well as Crystal Reports (I generate reports into these different document types all day - well, a process does). From memory, there is an issue if the .NET assembly has not provided/exposed a COM layer/interface - I don't know the correct terms, but I think this is the issue.

In researching to make this work, I found several bug reports filed at php.net where things within mscorlib didn't even work (whereas other things within the same assembly - such as the example given on the dotnet man page - work fine), which I was able to replicate. That's what led to my loss of confidence in the dotnet class, and to looking for another way of doing it. (That, and a web page I found where one of the dotnet class developers said he had completely given up on it.) After getting my custom assembly working with the UniversalCCW library (which provides a COM wrapper around any assembly), I tried it again with the dotnet class. I get pretty inconsistent results - sometimes it will return immediately, and sometimes it will sit for several minutes before returning - if it returns at all before timing out. When I tried the examples in the bug reports I referred to above, I got some generic error messages back (the same ones that are in the bug reports). - Trevor