Isolating ASP .Net 1.1 Applications

How to use unregistered COM components from ASP .Net 1.1 Applications

ASP .Net 1.x has built-in support for Windows unmanaged (win32) side-by-side functionality. When a request is being processed ASP .Net 1.x uses CServiceConfig and the IServiceSxsConfig interface to configure the activation context to use web.manifest manifest file from the application root folder. This was originally designed to behave the same way as the ASP manifest configuration but over time drifted away from that goal. Windows 2003 Server service pack 2 actually removed the support for win32 side-by-side in ASP .Net 1.1. This was later corrected in a hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939044. This support was entirely dropped in ASP .Net 2.0 and a different approach is necessary (How to isolate ASP .Net 2.0 web application).

To configure Win32 side-by-side for the use of ASP Net 1.x application:

Create a private or shared assembly (or assemblies) with the components you need to use.
Install these assemblies on the web server; copy to a subdirectory of the application directory if private, install with MSI if shared.
Create a private assembly referencing all the above private and shared Win32 assemblies. Name the project web which will make the manifest name web.manifest.
Copy this manifest to the application directory on the server.
There is no need to configure the manifest in application properties, as is the case with ASP, because ASPNET.dll does not check that configuration item anyway. The manifest name is hard-coded to web.manifest.

The activation context created by loading web.manifest is used to access Win32 (non-managed) COM classes and DLLs. Note that this does not affect the way CLR looks for and loads .Net (managed) assemblies.