Does anyone know of a good PDF viewer control for .NET? I need to just point it to a file and have it display the PDF. The API needs to include the ability to navigate through the pages. I also need to be able to print without displaying the viewer. I am using the Adobe Reader ActiveX control right now but I don't like the bar it puts on the left side of the screen and I can't print without loading the control on a form first.

modified on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 4:11 PM

I have an issue with ADO.NET that I have been trying to resolve for some time now. No one at the MSDN forums seems to know what is going on so I thought I would check here. Check out this post and tell me what you think. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/netfxbcl/thread/ad5910d2-7f13-47d7-8cbe-df39e850982f[^] Thanks.

I use two. I could definitely use a third. Especially when debugging. My IDE in the center, the app being debugged on the left, and my documentation, music, and chat windows on the right. I can't imagine debugging in a single window (unless it was a shell app being debugged by GDB). When apps hit breakpoints in debuggers they don't repaint themselves which means any area the window covers is unusable. I also use multiple screens to run multiple instances of my IDE at the same time. I can be coding a control in one IDE while I am working on integration of the control into an app in a second IDE and still be able to see both sets of code side by side.

I failed to mention that this application was developed over the past 4 years by this guy. He is 50+ years old and is a part-time ITT Tech teacher; a job that he was doing while he worked here and I think still is doing. I don't know what he teaches but I think he has a CS degree. I don't know how many years experience he has in the industry. It could be that this was his first C++ app though. He obviously is or was a C programmer at some point in time. This week I removed 20,000+ lines of redundant and unnecessary code from the program. CODE, not comments. And I am just getting started. I have to add functionality to it now. I spend half my time writing new C# code and the other half maintaining the legacy stuff. It makes me cry every time I close Visual Studio 2008 and open Borland Studio 2006 :( .

Here is an example: <Stagenumber="0" minaw="0.1" maxaw="0.8" desorpFr="300" adsorpFr="300" used="true"/> I didn't know elements could have values. Well they can't. XML viewers won't even read it. You should see the code that parses this. It is pretty much one gigantic function that reads in the file character by character.

I inherited a Borland Win32 application that has over 60 global variables interspersed throughout it. Many of the globals are multilevel struct instantiations. Nearly every class definition has a line similar to this after it: "extern PACKAGE TTree *Tree;" The actual declarations of these variables are either in the code for the "about page", above the program's "main" function, or in "globals.cpp" There is a file called "structs.h" which contains the definitions for every struct used in the application. structs that have to do with the database, visual controls, file contents, etc are all in the same file. The file is 6,000 lines long. There is a file called "globals.h" that is 3,000 lines long that is nothing but #defines. The #defines are related to, you guessed it: database, individual visual controls, different file formats, and other processing specific code. The file is included in every .cpp file. Very few of the #defines have meaning in more two .cpp files. 8 of the 28 .cpp files in the project are over 10,000 lines long. The longest is 14,433 lines. Most of the code in these mammoths has nothing to do with what the file name would have you think they are doing. Instead of using one of the hundred different XML processing libraries out there, this guy decides to write his own in order to make a way of saving data. The produced files aren't even valid XML so I can't replace it with a more efficient XML processor. I have to maintain his version of XML syntax for backward compatibility. There isn't a single pass by reference in the entire application. It is all pointers. There is no function polymorphism being performed. There are a ton of functions with parameters that specify the kind of data being handled with switch-cases that handle different kinds of data. Every struct declaration looks like this: "struct CALIB_STRUCT Calib;" Always all caps, always has the "struct" keyword, and always ends with "_STRUCT". There is no real naming scheme. Sometimes constants are all caps, sometimes they aren't, sometimes they are structs. He declares every variable that could possibly be used by the function at the top of the function. This includes those huge structs that never get used. Get this guy a copy of the C++ standard please! Many functions are over 500 lines long. Thank goodness for split-screened editors. The only container that is used are statically defined arrays (usually of structs) even when there is no way to know how many elements will be

I am looking for a good control that gives me the same functionality that can be seen at the bottom of the graph in the Google Financial website but can be used in a .Net Windows Application without running a Flash layer. I need a trackbar control that allows you to set the position of two different handles in order to create a value range. http://finance.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI%20INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC%20INDEXSP:.INX[^] These are the only three I have been able to find after hours of searching. The DevExpress one comes in a huge suite of controls and all I want is the RangeTrackBar control. http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/WinForms/Editors/editors/rangeTrackBarControl.xml[^] The C# RangeBar looks a little too Win95. I could work on updating the GUI elements but I would rather not. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/selection/zzzzrangebar.aspx[^] A good looking free possibility is the Avalon RangeSlider. I would want to change the appearance which means I would need to learn some XAML. http://www.codeplex.com/AvalonControlsLib/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=10250[^] Does anyone know of any other commercial or free to use controls like these? I would like a few more options before I make a decision. Thanks!

GNU tools like Flex (Lex) and Bison (Yacc) produce C code that can be compiled into a application that needs the usage of a lexical analyzer and parser. Are there any such faculties or tools for the .Net framework for doing such tasks? I don't think that making a .net wrapper for the code produced by the GNU tools is an option. The amount of code they produce is huge. Perhaps creating a regular DLL out of the C code and exposing only the functions I need is a possible solution but I would prefer a managed code solution. Any ideas?

I found the flash code for the applet on the Google finance site. They call it a time-series graph and it is written in actionscript 3. http://code.google.com/p/time-series-graph/ I don't know how to make standalone apps that embed flash so I am still looking for a .Net or MFC control. If anyone knows of a way to embed flash into a .Net or MFC application. I would love to know about it.

We are going to need to go on a field trip for this one. Go to: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=.DJI%20.IXIC%20.INX If that link doesn't work you can go to: http://finance.google.com/finance and click on the graph on the right side of the page under "Market Summary" What you see when you get there is a brilliant little flash applet that creates a real-time interactive graph. Play around with it a little. You can grab the sliders at the bottom of the graph and adjust the period of time that you want to look at. Pretty nifty. I would love it if I could find either a .Net, MFC, Java (or even Flash) control/component/module/library that would allow me to have this sort of functionality in a stand alone application. The one at the link is made by Google apparently but I don't think they have released the source. I have seen tons of graphing/charting libraries (nevron, dundas, dotnetcharting, ZedGraph, ChartFX...). None of them provide this interactive capability. Does anyone out there know of such a thing? I'll go commercial or free which ever provides the functionality. If not, someone should make one. It's money in the bank.