1- MS once thought of discontinuing COM, has since changed its mind and keeps it alive and kicking
2- you can get a direct return from a COM object, with an outside exe (eg. RUN in VFP) caller and called need to share a file

>I admit I know little about COM-DLL. But if I understand it, it has to be registered (negative). And didn't MS discourage using COM-DLL? (maybe I confused things).
>
>But, I do call a small VFP 9 exe (not COM-DLL) from this ASP.NET application. And it works very well.
>Why could not I create a regular small VFP 9 app and convert this report to the PDF using XFRX?
>Must it be a COM-DLL?
>
>Thank you.