NMath can be used to create ASP.NET web applications, just like any other .NET application. However, there are a few additional considerations for building and deploying ASP.NET applications.
Referencing NMath
To use NMath types in your application, add a reference to NMath.dll, just as you would with other types of .NET applications. If you are using web projects in Visual Studio, you can simply right-click the References folder and select the Add Reference… command. If you specify Copy Local = true in the reference’s properties, then the assembly will be copied to the /bin directory of the web application, facilitating deployment to a web server.
If you are not using web projects in Visual Studio (e.g. using the “Open Web Site” command in Visual Studio, or using other development tools), then you can alternatively specify the reference in the web.config file, like this:
<configuration>
<system.web>
<compilation>
<assemblies>
<add assembly=”NMath, Version=<Version>, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=<Token>”/>
</assemblies>
</compilation>
</system.web>
</configuration>
We recommend that you do not add references to the kernel assemblies, as the appropriate kernel assembly for your platform is loaded at runtime and the appropriate native DLL is linked to the kernel. Instead, place the kernel assemblies in the same location as the native DLLs, as described below.
Note: when the web server launches an ASP.NET application for the first time, the assemblies in the /bin directory are loaded into memory. If the /bin directory contains a mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit assemblies (for example, both NMathKernelx86.dll and NMathKernelx64.dll), then depending on the configuration of the web server, the application may fail to start and instead throw an exception like this: “An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.”
Kernel Assemblies and Native DLLs
For ASP.NET applications, Microsoft recommends that the /bin directory contain only .NET assemblies, not native DLLs.
If the deployment web server may not have NMath installed directly, then we recommend that the appropriate kernel assembly (NMathKernelx86.dll or NMathKernelx64.dll) and the appropriate native DLLs (e.g. nmath_native_x86.dll or nmath_native_x64.dll) be placed in a folder within the web application root directory, such as /NativeBin. This folder should then be copied to the deployment web server along with the rest of your application.
NMath Configuration
NMath settings can be configured as described in Chapter 1.5 of the NMath User’s Guide. However, when deploying web applications — especially to a shared hosting environment — it’s quite common not to know the details about the physical structure of the file system, and to have restricted access to the system’s environment variables. The references to resources within web apps are typically relative to the root of the virtual directory for the website, regardless of where they might physically reside on disk.
For this reason, starting in NMath 5.3, the ASP.NET ~ operator can be used to specify the location of the NMath native libraries and the log file, relative to the web application root. That is, these can be specified in the web.config file like this:
<add key=”NMathNativeLocation” value=”~/NativeBin” />
<add key=”NMathLogLocation” value=”~/Logs” />
It is not sufficient to use relative paths (e.g. “bin/”), since the executing assembly is usually the ASP.NET worker process, and depending on the web server configuration, the working directory will usually be a subdirectory of the Windows system directory (e.g. c:\windows\system32).
The ~ operator can only be used in ASP.NET applications; specifying this in a Windows application will cause the path to be resolved incorrectly.