Rob Fitzpatrick
ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Agreed. Using COM to create documents was an acceptable solution when it was the only solution. But Microsoft themselves recommend against and do not support running client applications (Word, Excel) as headless, server-side applications as they were inherently never designed to be used that way. For that reason they created automation servers to address that need.Maybe I'm biased but I would strongly recommend against com-handles.
Also, given that Office document formats are now published as open standards, you don't need to use Microsoft tools at all to create them.