Launching COM on remote machine from web service

[Talal Sultan]

Hi people, I have a COM object installed on a remote machine. I have been provided with a .NET assembly to communicate with this COM. The COM is used to validate some data and return the result. I create a small console application that uses the .NET assembly to contact the COM. At first, we had some problems with "Access denied" because of security issues, so now we have set the security of the COM to run under the launching user. The console application works fine and the COM returns the results expected. Now, I'm trying to do the same but from a web service. The idea is to have a windows application contact the web service to run the COM validation. It didn't work, so I thought that maybe I need to impersonate the user calling the .NET assembly that calls the COM. So I used the code on this page: http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/1572.aspx[^] When I debug, I can see that when I enter the web service method, the impersonation works fine and I can check that Environment.UserName is my username. This username has worked fine when i called the COM from the console application. I could see that the owner of the dllhost process was my username. So, the impersonation works fine but the COM fails to execute when I call the relevant method in the accompanying assembly. I don't seem to understand what could be going wrong here. I don't know much about this COM+ stuff and impersonation, so maybe i'm missing something. Does someone have a clue about this thing and what to do to fix it? Thanks, Talal

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