Hi,
I have a DLL that talks to the widget on a comm port. It grabs the comm port
and hold it for the life of the application that invoked it.
With a windows client there is no problem as the appropriate class is only
instantiated once, getting control of the comm port and processing requests
as required.

I want to expose the functionality via a web service.( I am a newbie with
Web services)
What is the best way to way bolt this together? It seems to me that you
can't just reference the DLL in the web service as only one instantiation
can have control of the comm port. Also the initial handshaking to the
widget on the end of the port is timeconsuming and only wants to occur once.

So how do you implement a web service when the functionality can only have
one copy instantiated ? i.e. Stateless Web service married to stateful DLL.
Thanks
Bob