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I don't understand this, Michael. Setting up so that Windows calls Adobe Reader for PDF documents is automatically done when you install Adobe Reader. Sure, it's possible for a user to undo that association, but then they wouldn't be able to open PDFs from a browser, E-mail client, Windows Explorer, et al. They'd have to manually open Adobe and then use File/Open to read a PDF. Certainly possible, but who does that in this day and age?

Or perhaps a better question, who does that *and* expects PDF documents to just automatically open up for them on the screen?!

I do NOT, however, agree with Doug's suggestion of using the DOS "start" command. The "start" command will lead to oodles of hard-to-solve errors any time you have special characters in the path name. Plus, it causes an ugly DOS window to open for each PDF.

Instead, use a Windows program with the ShellExecute() API, or ShellExec_RunDLL from the command-line via the Rundll32 program.

And searching for and finding the adobe reader executable isn't a good way to handle things, either. What if a user has more than one copy of it, and is using one version for production use and another one just for tests? How can your VB program know which one is which?

Or for whatever other reason, they have another program called AcroRd32? How can you know which one to run? (It could even be a trojan taking advantage of the way your VB program works to try to trick you into running a malicious tool... unlikely perhaps, but possible.)

Perhaps only a small percentage of folks will do these things -- but still -- why NOT do it the right way?


Michael Naughton wrote:
Thanks, Doug. I did know that, but for some reason we had trouble getting it to work -- maybe because not everyone had a default program set up? But you're right -- it's the first thing to try, and if it works you're home free.


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