I had the opportunity to play around with generating word documents last week. At first I looked at what I had used before (the Office PIA).

I quickly remembered that it was not very easy to work with because most of it is based on COM interop anyways. Further-more, I stumbled across a little MSDN article that stated that the Office PIA should not be used to generate documents from a server; it suggested that it only be used in desktop application environments where a user is controlling the application itself. I imagine that is because the Office PIA really only invokes the Word application and tells the Word application what to do in real-time (or something like that)… and that makes sense to me. Can you imagine a web server that gets even 100 users spawning each of their own processes of word.exe to generate a doc?! Production… Nightmare… (more…)

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