PDFViewerNet - OSS PDF WinForm viewer component (leverages GhostScript, XPDF or muPDF)

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) - pdfviewernet, where have you been all my life?

I use the acrobat reader activex control to show pdf's in my winforms application. And yesterday I was bitching about it on twitter because it for some reason was blocking a folder on my buildserver every time I ran a build. At that point in time I could either choose to avoid the tests that made this happen or just use a hammer and get rid of the adobe acrobat reader at the end of my build. So I bitched about this on twitter, as one always does, and I got some very useful replies

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And did you see the suggestion by the ever brilliant Jeremiah Peschka. So I did what he said and checked that project out.

Pdfviewernet

You can find pdfviewernet on google code. First thing you'll note is that it is written in VB.Net which is brilliant. Second thing to note is that the downloads have a very old date on them. So I decided to install tortoisesvn again and compile against the trunk.

Sadly it isn't on nuget (yet).

This is very easy and if you then open and run it you even get a little demo app to play with.

I opened a pdf with it.

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pdfviewernet 

"VB.NET project that consists of a PDF Viewer control that can display any PDF file without having any Acrobat programs installed on the client. It can be configured to use GhostScript, muPDF or XPDF. "

I've only been watching for free/oss Windows PDF libraries/etc for forever and hadn't seen this before. Extra credit for being written in VB. :)