I'm a developer for a company has a rather large legacy application written in VB6. This application was originally developed to be run stand alone, but over the years we began offering a hosting solution to our customers.
Right now we are trying to perform damage control until we can replace the application with a more enterprise friendly solution. Currently our major issue is printing. In the current implementation, each application server must have a all of the customer's printers installed onto the servers as well as the necessary drivers. Our IS department has several other complaints about this method of printing, but anyone who has used VB6's Printer object probably already knows them all.
What I would like to do is move the printing functionality to a web service, and modify the legacy application to call the service instead of handling the printing on the app server. It seems to me that instead of rewriting all of the printing code that is scattered across the project (not my project, please no flames :-)) is to print to an xps document, and then transfer that document to the web service.
The problem is that we are still using Win2k for some of my application servers (this is not my call, and is equally frustrates me because most of my new development still has to be done in .NET 2.0). I've searched around for a solution, but I couldn't find any. Also, the XPS Essentials pack does not appear to support Win2k.
So, my question is two parts:
Is there any way to print to an XPS document from Win2k?
Are there any glaring flaws in my implementation?
Sorry for the lengthy post. I was just trying to prevent the "why are you even doing this" questions, that I would probably ask myself. Any help would be appreciated.
