Using Microsoft.Ink in ASP.NET on Windows Server 2008

Question

I'm developing an ASP.NET web application. The site generates PDF files which contain images of handwritten content (signatures etc.). The bitmap images are created by some methods of the Microsoft.Ink library, converting MS Ink data (generated on a Tablet PC and transferred to the site.).

Now, it works like charm on my Vista development machine, but not on the production server, a Windows Server 2008 64bit machine. There is some unmanaged code for Microsoft.Ink besides the .NET assemblies I deployed. So I installed the Tablet PC SDK 1.7 on the server - but I still get some missing COM component error messages in ASP.NET (COMException 0x80040154):

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {937C1A34-151D-4610-9CA6-A8CC9BDB5D83} failed due to the following error: 80040154.

I've read that Windows Server 2008 R2 has the option to install Handwriting Recognition. Is there a package for Windows Server 2008 as well? I searched on Google, but I couldn't find a solution.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Have you tried recompiling for x86 only? You may find that one of the components is 32-bit and is incompatible with 64-bit code. I had a similar experience recently when I upgraded to a new laptop with 64-bit Vista - a project that used to compile just fine wouldn't any more. It turned out that the Crystal Reports components in it were 32-bit only and would not work with 64-bit code. I changed from "Any CPU" as the active solution platform to "x86" and it worked fine. Unfortunately this means your app won't make full use of the 64-bit capabilities of the server, but it will work.

Answer 2

I did a bunch of google posts and found this post in another group. I don't know if it will help you but here it is...

In a Vista 64 bit environment, as Steve Goodwin says in his post, WISPTIS.EXE is not available in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ but it is in c:\Windows\System32. SO I copied it, and darn it, it finally works.

It's a long shot, but there are other comments in the thread with other ideas for various operating systems. but it won't be immediately clear why I chose to post something from this group since your error is not mentioned. here's how I got there.

First, I googled the CLSID you posted above. I found that this brings up results indicating that the file the registry value is associated with is WISPTIS.EXE, so I googled that and came up with that fact that WISPTIS.exe is the Snipping tool... So a few more search pages brought me to this, which looks likely to me ONLY because I've had enough issues with my 64-bit Vista looking for files in the wrong place, that this seems like a likely culprit.

Anyway, here's the link to the thread where I dug this answer out.

http://adilhindistan.blogspot.com/2007/07/vista-snipping-tool-error.html