Inventor and ASP.net

[Anonymous]

I'm just starting to learn about ASP.net. As part of this process, I've written a very simple page that allows the user to specify an Inventor part name, and after clicking a button they're gifted with a bitmap of said part in the browser. Very basic, but I'm hoping to eventually expand on this to make something that's actually useful.

Here's my problem: When running the page in debug mode (using Visual Studio 2005), everything works great. When I put it 'live' using IIS on my computer, the page hangs when attempting to get the bitmap from Inventor.

The only difference that I can see is that when I run in debug mode, the Inventor process I create (or latch on to if it's already existing) is running under my account, whereas with the live page the process runs under the ASPNET account. Inventor *is* getting launched by my page, but it is apparently getting hung up somewhere. The Inventor process is still running, it's just sitting there doing nothing. Of course, even though I've specified the Inventor app to run as visible and not silent, I don't see the interface, and I don't see any messages from that process.

I've assigned the ASPNET user on my machine to the Administrators group, so I don't think there's any permissions issues that would keep Inventor from behaving normally. The copy of Inventor I have on this machine is network licensed - I only bring that up because at some point (either during debug or when I was running the page live) I did see the FlexLM dialog come up asking me to either specify a license server or a license file. I think that was coincidental, though, or was solved by the permissions change I made to the ASPNET user.

I even logged on to the ASPNET user account and opened up Inventor to see if there were any problems in that regard, and it worked just fine.

Any thoughts?

[Anonymous]

I haven't tried running Inventorin the way you described but I was working
on a project to get Inventor running on a server where the login did not
have a visible window. I was running into a similar issue. If I watched
task manager when the program was starting Inventor you could see the
Inventor.exe process start and memory get consumed up to a certain point and
then everything would stop. We ended up logging interactively into the
account that was being used and trying running Inventor. It turned out a
dialog was popping up informing us that Inventor needed to be registered and
that Explorer would be restarted. We did that and after that everything
worked fine.
--
Brian Ekins
Autodesk Inventor API

[Anonymous]

I never did get Inventor to respond by letting the ASPNET user launch the process. If I use Impersonation, however, it works like a charm.