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I have finished developing an executable desktop application to generate a fractal image based on the passed-in arguments. The output type is JPEG.

Now I am developing a site under ASP.NET MVC 3. I want to use the executable from within my site.

Is it possible to use it as is without converting it to a class library and recompiling?

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If you mean "to run on the user's machine", then not "as is" - you might want to look at Silverlight for that.

If you mean "to use at the server", then it will of course depend on how it operates (whether it prompts for input etc), and how it works (does it use GDI+, for example? that isn't recommended for use on web servers).

But sure; you can shell an exe with Process.Start, or if it is a .NET exe you can either add a reference directly to the exe and use it as a library (if it has appropriate code)

There is also a way to run it in-process via AppDomain.ExecuteAssembly - not sure this latter is a good idea on a web-server, though... especially if the exe talks to stdout.

For getting the image back to the client, you would want this processing to happen (perhaps with caching) in a route that uses return File(...); from MVC to simulate the image stream.

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4 Comments

Garvell - How come that GDI isn't recommended for use on web servers?
@ebb - see the big yellow box on MSDN: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.aspx
Garvell - Ah I see... Do you know any good alternatives for web apps? - At the moment I'm using GDI in my own to generate thumbnails...
@ebb - I haven't had cause to look
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Use the system.Diagonstics.Process class to call the exe with a StartInfo object to pass the appropriate arguments.

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yes but this executes on the server only where eventually there is nobody logged in at all.
You can execute an exe in the context of a server. This only becomes a problem where you need access to resources that are not available to the server user. If this is the case then the best bet is to take out the common classes and sue them from a dll.

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