Adding a DWF Preview to Visual Basic VB.Net Application

[sgwilliams]

I'm currently creating a VB application that searches through our dwf library and opens a part by file name. It's a simple little program that allows our employees to view our product prints quickly and efficiently. I want to add a Preview box on the application window of the form that shows what the print looks like while I select it from a listbox of possible items to open when I do a print search.

Does anyone have any VB code that could help? We are using the most recent version of Design Review and are current with our Inventor Design Suite Subscription. I did download the Design Review SDK but have not seen anything in it that would allow me to do this.

[sgwilliams]

Ok So i did some investigating and found the Autodesk DWF Viewer Control for the VB2015 toolbox. Guess what when I try to add the control to the form the Visual Studio 2015 crashes. I tried adding the control to a new form with no code and it still crashes. I have to say that i'm pretty frustrated with Autodesk right now. Why would you make a control available for a product and not maintain it to function with the most common of development tools available, this is just lazy. I have spent the last 6 hours searching the web to come to the conclusion that Autodesk has abandoned this product and won't support it any longer. But there is an upside...me.thinks! There is is always PDF! Muuuuhaaahaaa!

After a few more hours of trying to get the control to insert into the form I almost scrapped the dwf viewer idea all together, which I still might. What changed my mind was a post in the Autodesk forums that gave a solution for VS Studio 2010. In this posting it gave this workflow to get the control to work. 

1.  Create a new C# | VB.Net project (my project is Visual Basic | VB.Net)
2.  Create a new UserControl in the Project Solution
3.  (This is very important)  Turn OFF the solution explorer and property display ( This did not work for me until I closed all open windows in the Project except the new control and the toolbox)
4.  Insert the DWF viewer in the new UserControl: (It shouldn't crash at this point)
5.  Add the new UserControl at runtime inside your form

This actually worked for VS Studio 2015 which surprises the hell out me. I still may change our company print viewer to PDF as it has much more available options than this proprietary Autodesk Viewer. I will play with this for a few weeks and see if I can get it to do all I need it too. Once I decide I will post my findings here so others can benefit from my discovery since Autodesk is leaving us in the dark on their DWF Viewer. When I get a some working code for the DWF I will let you know.

to be Continued......

[sgwilliams]

Update:

After much discussion with my development team we decided to stay with the Design Review ActiveX Control for now. I spent the last week digging in and getting this to work and it seems to be stable after it is compiled. The main issue we have is that there is a glitch with this control when viewing the form in "Design" mode if you click anywhere on the control VS 2015 crashes and restarts. I do have some other issues but will post them separately and try to get a solution for them.

I'm very disappointed in Autodesk for not commenting on this posting. My biggest issue is that Autodesk puts out a control for us to use and then bails and won't help us when we have problems. It's seems to be easier for them to say sorry we discontinued that but have nothing else to replace it. Not every customer is going to use cloud technology. There is just to many risk in doing so. Our team decided that when the Design Review ActiveX Control  quits working with the exported dwf files from newer versions of Inventor we will be switching to PDF as a base and buying the Foxit PDF ActiveX SDK which is very robust and will allow us to develope our in house applications without all this hassle.

If anyone needs help with getting the Design Review ActiveX Control to work in the VS 2015 I will be more than glad to help.

I have added a screencast of the application, as you can see it works nicely (so far). I will release this to our manufacturing floor in a couple more weeks after I add a few more bells and whistles and do some extensive testing to make sure it is still stable.

[pendean]

Autodesk appears to be abandoning the DWF format: ADR died in the year 2012 (what year is it now?), no replacement is available, Autodesk's flagship products in the latest versions are all PDF centric with all new PDF tools and more.

perform a google search on the web and read all about Autodesk and PDF (and lack of any mention towards DWF).

[sgwilliams]

Yes I know all about autodesk and them dropping software and leaving you high and dry, it's a pattern with them. Ever hear of VoloView pretty much the same thing. Any hoot I have band-aided my Application to use the DWF viewer but will probably drop it once the viewer is no longer compatible with new versions of Inventor.  Then I'll pay the money for Foxit PDF ActiveX Control SDK. It has a lot of nice features. And they have way better support than Autodesk. They actually work with you to implement their controller to verify it will work with you before they charge you for the software. Can't beat that! 

 I know why they are dropping the software, they have moved in another direction, it's called the cloud. The A360 Viewer does it all except allow the customer to keep his files out of the cloud. I don't know about the rest of the manufacturing community but as a company we are not yet sold on how secure the cloud servers are that would hold our company's intellectual data. Autodesk does not seem to care about those that do not trust the cloud. I see stories on the news all the time about another company's server getting hacked. I'm sure as big of a company that Autodesk is that they farm their storage out to the lowest bidder that claims to have good security. I have not read anywhere of how they store our data. Is it stored in a facility that keeps our privacy and intellectual data secured beyond a shadow of a doubt or is it a fly by night operation that say's one thing and does another. How often is the Storage facility audited to guarantee it's working properly? 

My question is why do we have to upload anything? Why must my files be sent to a cloud instead of keeping them locally and viewing them locally. From what I understand the file is sent up to the cloud and then it can be shared thru the A360 software. I have no problem as long as there is an option to do both but that was taken from us without even giving the customer any consideration. After all the customers are the blood of your company. Without customers where does your funds come from to develope new idea's?

I can see that many companies will probably end up leaving Autodesk to find software that better suits their needs we have been discussing this very thing recently. To bad because I love Inventor.

[pendean]

Cloud storage and security is an ongoing discussion for many software firms: and like many software firms moving there they are focusing on the folks that are ready to move now that work is small teams to iron out the bugs etc vs. focusing on the users needing the security and controls that you do.

If your company is "big enough" Autodesk (and anyone else) will gladly tailor their current cloud offerings to you and you alone if you want it. But you have to ask, you have to be proactive about it and I suspect you'll have to commit to something in return for the special treatment. You're not going to find any solutions on the web.

I'm not in manufacturing myself but from what little I have observed Autodesk software are not at the top of anyone's software list in those industries. Right?

[sgwilliams]

My company purchased multiple seats of Autodesk Product Design Suite Ultimate 2016 and Autodesk Vault Professional 2016. The software we use from the design suite includes Inventor 2016 Professional and Design Review 2013(which is really a dressed up version of 2012). We generate solid model components and assemblies and then create 2d drawings from those models for our manufacturing processes.

The application I'm creating simplifies the process of viewing these manufacturing drawings in our manufacturing environment. My application is created with Microsoft VS 2015(this application is current). It is a Visual Basic coded Windows Form Application. This is installed on all manufacturing workstations that require the ability to view drawings. There obviously was a reason that Autodesk created this ActiveX control and released it to it's customer base, is it so hard for them to maintain it and keep it current? And if they are going to choose not to keep it current then at least explain to it's customer base why? Instead we get ignored and jerked around by a support team that doesn't not care enough about it's customer base to call and help those who pay thousands of dollars a year for the software and the support of that software. I have invested many hours of my companies time trying to get customer support from Autodesk, I requested help for weeks and have gotten hardly nowhere with them.

Dean, I do not need special treatment, I just need some support. Real support not the BS I have gotten in the last 2 now going on 3 weeks. I'm not sure how I can get Autodesk to custom tailor anything for my company when they will not even help me when I need it. Besides we as a company are not going to the cloud at all. Owners of the company do not want their intellectual data stored online. They have invested heavily to store it on servers on our local domain(this means not connected to the internet). The cloud is not an option for us. Period.

The last email I received from them was last Friday at 9:12 AM. This is the response I got back from them:

>> Is Autodesk moving everything to the cloud? 

No, our Cloud offering is an additional feature. All our desktop offerings will be maintained. The specific problem we're discussing here is around old Microsoft COM API (i.e. ActiveX) that have some problems, even with Visual Studio.

The tech said "All our desktop offerings will be maintained.". Really? Where is the current Viewer at? Where is the ActiveX Viewer control for dwf that doesn't crash Visual studio when I click on it? There is none because they haven't updated it. They have 4 year old API for an outdated ActiveX Control that crashes Microsoft's Visual Studio Software.

Visual Basic is windows most commonly used language for many years. I cannot find an updated API that Autodesk has created for its ActiveX Viewer Control that is newer than 2012 in the visual basic language. The API shows how to load the Control into the VS .net software but all the examples of the code that I can find in the API are in the VB6 Coding language which Microsoft hasn't supported since early 2008.

All the new API's that I have found are all Javascript web based stuff, for an additional feature it sure looks to me like that is where all the new development has gone. Maintained? Really ...Is this some kind of tech joke they are playing on the end user or what. Cause I'm not laughing.

How hard would it be for Autodesk to call and give me a straight answer instead of wasting our companies time waiting on them. Not one person from Autodesk has called to help me with this. NOT ONE! What is the point in paying for support when you do not receive any.

Oh and here is a screenshot of the properties dialog from the ActiveX Viewer Control. Maintained? It's still on File Version 1.0.0.0. Really? Maintained?? I think not! It doesn't look like it has ever been updated or fixed at all. Either that or the version control needs some real attention.

[sgwilliams]

Here is even more Icing on the cake for ya. The file Created date of the API file is 2 years older than the year it was supposedly released. SO it really should be called the Design Review 2011 API Reference because it doesn't look like it was generated in 2013.

What do you think Spock? 

Fascinating Captain!

[sgwilliams]

Finally got a response from the tech working on my support ticket. We spoke on the phone he tried to reproduce the issue with the ActiveX Control and he got it to crash like mine did. So he is escalating this ticket and forwarding it to the original developers of the Viewer control to see if they can fix the control issue. He said it may get fixed and it may not depending on what is causing it to crash. It will be a day or two before he gets back with me because half the development team who developed this control are in San francisco and the other half are in Shanghai or something. So it will take some time for them to collaborate. I will update this post when I know something.

[sgwilliams · Accepted solution]

Update: Still no word from the tech from the Autodesk Developer network. I guess there is no fix as Autodesk has made me wait over a month for an answer. I have no more to say about Autodesk's priorities and the quality of their customer support. What's the point!

We have dropped the dwf platform altogether. We have figured out how to print a pdf file on check-in When using inventor. It was actually a rather simple script that we came up with in a couple hours after going thru the Inventor and Vault API's. We then purchased the Foxit PDF SDK ActiveX viewer control. This allows us to view our pdf documents in our in-house built windows application. The Foxit controller is very robust and has many features like commenting, highlighting, form creation, digital signatures and annotating. One of the other things this allows us to do is develop an in-house Engineering Change Order process in the same application as the view. The ECO process Autodesk has for its vault software is very complex and requires about $5000 worth of training to use. We are developing a simple process that does not require all those bells and whistles that we will never use. Plus the cost to develop the ECO portion cost way less than $5000.

In short, we are no longer going to rely on Autodesk for support as it has become a huge burden to even get a simple question answered in a timely manner. Also if anyone needs help generating pdf's like we have, send me a private message and I'll point you in the right direction.