Printing from a .NET Service

Printing from a Windows service is really painful. It seems to work... sometimes... but finally it craches or throws an exception from time to time, without any clear reason. It's really hopeless. Officially, it's even not supported, without any explanation, nor any proposal for an alternate solution.

Recently, I have been confronted to the problem and after several unsuccessful trials and experimentations, I came finally with two viable solutions:

• Write your own printing DLL using the Win32 API (in C/C++ for instance), then use it from your service with P/Invoke (works fine)
• Write your own printing COM+ component, then uses it from your service. I have chosen this solution with success recently (but it was third party COM+ component, not own written) It works absolutely fine too.

Trust me, you will spend more money trying to search/develop a solution for this as compared to buying a third party component. Do not reinvent the wheel and go for the paid solution.

Printing is a complex problem and I would love to see the day when better framework support is added for this.