No support for ASPCOMPAT in ASMX for Whidbey - disappointing

According to this LadyBug post, Microsoft is not adding support for executing ASMX requests in an STA thread pool (ie the "ASPCOMPAT=TRUE" directive that is available for ASPX pages). This is something that I complained about long ago, and I'm very disappointed that it isn't being addressed in v2.0 of the framework.

There's huge amounts of business logic running out there as COM code (most of it written in VB6 and therefore apartment threaded), and people aren't going to be inclined to rewrite or port it all. A great way of exposing that logic is as a web service - in fact, Microsoft has a Patterns and Practices guide describing what they call the "Web Service Facade". But without STA support, scalability seriously suffers (to put it mildly), and Microsoft's recommended workaround of running the COM object as a COM+ library application is problematic - many COM objects don't play nice under COM+. I've had to hack around this limitation, and while its doable, it's not particularly elegent or fun, and you still take a performance hit.

 

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