Is there a sample C# plug in?

[DavidThi_808]

Is there a sample plug in, written in C#, that is a good intro? Myabe just 1 button added to the Acrobat menu that inserts text at a specific place?

thanks - dave

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

Plug-ins have to be written in C or C++. You cannot write an Acrobat plug-in in C#. The only thing you can do with C# is to use the IAC API and have a way to "remote control" some aspects of Adobe Acrobat.

[DavidThi_808]

Ow, not the answer I was hoping for.

Here's my problem. We have a pretty large program, written in C#, that is an AddIn to Microsoft Office. We'd like to make it a plugin to Acrobat too. But rewriting it in C++ is a deal killer. It's not just the code, it's the 40 or so dialog boxes, some of which are very complex.

Can we write the plugin in Microsoft Visual Studio Managed C++, and that can then call our C# code? And yes, this means Windows only but that's ok for our use case.

Can that be done?

thanks - dave

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

You need to use plain old (unmanaged) C++ for the actual plug-in. I assume you could then find a way to link in managed code or your C# code, but that's not my field of expertise, so I will let others comment on that.

[DavidThi_808]

Ok, promising. Can I compile the code with Visual Studio C++? If so, there is a way from plain old C++ to call C#. It's a bit of a pain, but once set up then it just works.

thanks - dave

[DavidThi_808]

I'm reading the plug in developer guide and on page 39 it says a plug in can be compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio (good news).

But it limits it to VisualStudio 2003 and 2005. Is that correct? Or can I use Visual Studio 2015?

thanks - dave

[Karl Heinz Kremer · Accepted solution]

I think the latest SDK release still requires Visual Studio 2010. I have a virtual machine running Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 that I use for plug-in development.

As far as calling C# from native C++, see this stack overflow question: clr - Managed C++ to form a bridge between c# and C++ - Stack Overflow

[DavidThi_808]

Ok, thanks. I may be able to make this work (we use .NET 4.1 and C# 4, but as a reference that may be irrelevant to the C++ part).

Scary that they're 5 years behind on the tools that can be used.

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

Take a look at this discussion from a couple of weeks ago about VS 2015: Re: How to build Acrobat Plugin with Visual Studio 2015

[DavidThi_808]

Thank you - we will be targeting Acrobat Pro so we may be good.

Thank you so much for your help on this - you rock.

[Test Screen Name]

Your link to a plugin developer guide was from the Acrobat 8 SDK. About 9 years out of date. Best to start with the current SDK not loose documents.

[DavidThi_808]

Where is the current SDK documentation and downloads? I did a search for those and that's what came up.

thanks - dave

[dipaliwagh]

We have same requirement. Plugin is already developed for MS Office in Visual Studio 2017 on that we are displaying a form. and now its required for adobe. can you tell me what have you done to achieve this.

[Test Screen Name]

First Google hit on Acrobat SDK: Adobe - Acrobat Developer Center | Adobe Developer Connection

[Guest]

We have used C# WPF DLL libraries created using Unmanaged Exports - Robert Giesecke from Adobe plug-in. You will face some challenges to position windows etc. if C# DLL is where you host majority of the custom dialogs.