plugin creation

Please follow our advice. Start with the simplest plug-in. We are not interested in your results with a more complicated one until you have loaded a simple one. That is difficult enough.

I think you are trying to find a way to do this without a budget. You cannot.

To summarize, for I hope the last time.

1. To develop plug-ins you will need Acrobat (paid for)

2. EITHER

(a) every end user will need Acrobat also, their own paid for copy,

OR

(b) you will need to negotiate and your company will need to pay for a Reader key so your end users can work in Reader.

With no integration key, the plugin will NOT get added to Reader. EVERYONE using the plug-in needs to pay for their OWN copy of Acrobat. EVERYONE. The developer and every user.

Yes, the SDK exists for only one purpose: to sell more copies of Acrobat.

Yes, but you must stop using Acrobat Reader.

To start with you need to pay for Acrobat. Have you got Acrobat? No? Then get it. Forget Acrobat Reader for now, that is a long way from your starting point, and costs a lot of money.

Was my reply not clear? You develop your plug-ins for Acrobat, not Acrobat Reader. If you don't have Acrobat you need to pay for it.

I've read that you might find it there but nothing about how to manually install it...

The wizard is supposed to install with the SDK. You might need to reinstall the SDK.

You need to follow instructions EXACTLY. The most frustrating part of starting with plugins, is getting that first project to build and run. It is VITAL not to try to change anything, because it is hard enough with all the right elements. An expert could surely make other versions of Visual Studio work if it was important enough. This is even more important if you are new to Visual Studio, and concepts such as header file locations.

BasicPlugin is a project sample, so you open it as a project from its folder.

Don't be downhearted. This is not easy and all of us have struggled for the first few days or weeks.

Bemd has said that you need to use VIsual Studio 2013. You say you are using Visual Studio 2015. Are you using 2015 because the Acrobat SDK documentation says this exactly? If it does not say this, please refer to my initial reply 2.