Windows CE ASP Pages and System Access

I've been asked many times on the newsgroups how to access files from an ASP page running on Windows CE. Or how to create a process, or get at the registry, or any other of a bunch of system level actions. The answer to these questions is that you can't unless you do some work.

On desktop Windows IIS, there are a bunch of ActiveX objects that let you access the system directly. Unfortunately Windows CE does not have any of them. We do not foresee implementing them in a future release, either. That's not much consolation if you're writing an ASP page that needs low level access, so what can you do?  I see 2 options.

(1) Implement the parts of the Windows Script object(s) yourself that you need as ActiveX controls. There's nothing preventing you from doing this on CE. If you know COM already it shouldn't be that hard to implement just the portions you need.

(2) Don't access files "directly" from your ASP script. Instead, put much more of the system interaction logic into your ActiveX object. So rather than having ASP page do "var fooBarFile = FileSystem.Open("\foobar.txt"); fooBarFile.Read(); process fooBarData() in JScript") have your ActiveX control be called from ASP as "ReadAndProcessFile("\foobar.txt") and have the C++ code do *all* the work; not just reading in the file but also the processing.

[Author: John Spaith]