COM interface to search engine

I am in the process of integrating Sitefinity into an existing site that is a combination of ASP.NET and classic ASP.
Is there any COM interface to Sitefinity's search engine that I may use from the ASP code? We're currently using the Windows Content Indexing Service, but I'd like to keep a single search mechanism in place for Sitefinity and the ASP stuff.

Hello,
David,

Thank you for your question and the nice words for the new Sitefinity 4.4. I am glad that you appreciate the new features that our last release come shipped with.

The assemblies which come shipped with Sitefinity, including those of Lucene.NET (Telerik.Sitefinity.Utilities.Lucene.Net), are market with [assembly: ComVisible(false)].  As a consequence all public types within the assemblies are not visible to COM clients.

Of course, you have the fully exposed API of Sitefinity, with which you can interact within the scope of you Sitefinity solution. Thus, your suggestion for a wrapper makes a perfect sense and you could create a wrapper project that has COM interface capabilities to serve your needs.

Another thing devoted to this very topic is that in Sitefinity no class members  are set to ComVisible(false) -  only on the class level. So for example, if  ClassA is with ComVisible(false) attribute, the class and its members are invisible to COM. However, if you derive ClassB from ClassA and export ClassB to COM, ClassA members become visible base class members of ClassB. So, please have that in the back of your mind as it may be useful to you. Please, also check this Microsoft Guidelines for exposing .NET types to COM in case you feel you need to make some research on the topic.

If you need any assistance from us, please let us know.