TrueView 2015 ActiveX Control

[absStructural]

Since finding out that TrueView 2015 has a renamed dll (very beneficial because there was a dll conflict with AutoCAD), I decided to give it a whirl.

I have been able to embed the control in a Windows form and programmatically load a drawing successfully.

One annoying issue I'm finding is this:

When the window is first open, the cursor turns to crosshairs whenever the mouse moves across the TV control.  That's good.

If the window is minimized, then restored - the cursor no longer behaves this way.  Clicking (left or right mouse button) on the control does not change to crosshairs either.  The only way I have found to restore the crosshairs is to pan (using the middle click).  The real downside to this is that mouse wheel scrolling only functions when the crosshairs are shown.

Has anyone else run across this issue?

-- Slight rant below --

As an aside - if anyone knows of a better light weight DWG viewer, I'd love to hear it.  We've been using Volo Viewer for many years and have been mostly happy with it (particularly the speed in which it loads - and the speed in which drawings open).  Obviously there are some DWG version compatibility issues - which is why I'm looking at TV. 

TrueView is just... slow.  Even after TV is loaded, it takes too long to open or close a drawing.  Perhaps it has something to do with Volo being around 25MB and TrueView being north of 800MB. 

[Anonymous]

Hey there,

i have a question for you.

your embedding trueView into your applications, can this control view and print?

Gary

[absStructural]

Yes.

[Anonymous]

Do you have to purchase trueview to get the activex control?

[absStructural]

No.

[absStructural · Accepted solution]

After some more poking - it would appear that once the TV ActiveX control loses focus, it is not regaining focus.  This can be caused by minimizing the form, or clicking on another control.  Since my form only has one other control (a listview), I added an event listener for listview.MouseLeave - and set the focus to the TV control in that function.  Basically, if the mouse isn't on the only other control, then it must be over the TV control.

Unfortunately, the ActiveX control does not expose events like MouseEnter, Click, etc - so I couldn't utilize those.

For now this appears to be a viable work around, though something smells fishy.

[Anonymous]

any idea how to change the background from black to white

[absStructural]

This is not the correct thread for your questions.

[kstate92]

Well, this seems a perfect match made in Hell with their garbage Design Review control, which, after opening a tiff drawing, ignores programmatic re-focus to any other control, forcing the end user to click on the controls to do anything else.  They are aware of the issue.  They will never fix it.

But now, as an added benefit to this garbage control, I can no longer work with any projects that feature it, as it now instantly crashes the entire Visual Studio (Express) program just by clicking on it in the designer!  The one I need to fix the most (to correct control resizing behavior) now is dead in the water as this garbage control got highlighted just before the first crash, and is now stuck in permanent auto-crash Hell!  Naturally, Autodesk passively-aggressively blames Microsoft for this behavior.  Over three versions of their core programming environment.  Sure.

This crap used to work at least half-assed, but now I can't even replicate the simplistic programs I once created.  And does Autodesk care?  Nope: too busy with their head stuck in their precious 'clouds'.

[absStructural]

To be honest, I have up trying to use the control.  There are too many anomalies, and the performance was piss poor.  I ended up writing something that launches TrueView as a separate process.  In my case, this worked all right - but obviously not a solution for everyone.

In general, TrueView is relatively buggy.  If I don't close it regularly, it will eventually crash.