Eclipsed4utoo's Blog

Here is a quick tutorial on how to view a PDF file in a Windows Form application.

I downloaded PDFSharp (free).  While it is a third-party application, it will still require the PC to have Adobe Reader (or better) installed.

And here is the small piece of code needed to display a PDF in a Windows Form:

string helpFile = "C:\HelpFile.pdf";

// the pdfAcroViewer is a control from PDFSharp
// You can add the control to the Toolbox in Visual Studio
//     then drag it onto the form.
pdfAcroViewer.LoadFile(helpFile);
pdfAcroViewer.ShowToolbar = false;
pdfAcroViewer.SetPageMode(PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfPageMode.FullScreen);

EDITED: After a number of questions in the comments, I decided to download the latest version and see if I could find the file.  The file itself is not in the latest version.  When I did this more than a year ago, the latest version was version 1.0.898.  That version is still for download on sourceforge.

(screenshot below)

If you download that version, there will be directory located at “\PDFSharp\PdfViewer\PdfSharp.Viewing”.  In that directory, you will see a Visual Studio project with the name “PdfSharp.Viewing.csproj”.  Open the project in Visual Studio, and build the project in Release mode.  After building, you will have created a “bin\release” folder in that same directory.  You will need all of the .dlls in that directory(should be 6 of them).  One of them will be the “PdfSharp.Viewing.dll” which should contain the PdfAcroViewer control from the code above.

Post in the comments if this works for you.