PDFlib 8 Windows COM/.NET Tutorial

Using PDFlib with VB.NET. In order to use PDFlib.NET in your VB.NET project you must
create a reference to the PDFlib.NET assembly as follows in Visual Basic .NET: Project, Add
Reference..., Browse..., and select pdflib_dotnet.dll from the installation directory.
With the command line compiler you can reference PDFlib.NET as in the following
example:
vbc.exe /r:..\..\bin\pdflib_dotnet.dll hello.vb
Visual Basic .NET supports two different kinds of exception handling:
> modern structured exception handling (which is also used in other modern languages,
such as C#)
> traditional unstructured exception handling (which has been the only way of exception
handling in Visual Basic 6.0)
Client code can handle .NET exceptions thrown by PDFlib with both kinds of exception
handling, but the syntax varies. Catching Exceptions with structured exception handling
is the recommended way. It works with a try...catch clause:
Try
...some PDFlib instructions...
Catch e As PDFlibException
Console.WriteLine("PDFlib exception occurred in hello sample:")
Console.WriteLine("[{0}] {1}: {2}",
e.get_errnum(), e.get_apiname(), e.get_errmsg())
Finally
If Not p Is Nothing Then
p.Dispose()
End If
End Try
Catching exceptions with the traditional unstructured exception handling is achieved
with an On Error GoTo clause:
Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic
Public Shared Sub Main()
On Error GoTo ErrExit
...some PDFlib instructions...
Exit Sub
ErrExit:
Console.WriteLine("PDFlib exception caught: {0}", Err.Description)
End Sub
Using PDFlib with C++ and CLI. .NET applications written in C++ (based on the
Common Language Infrastructure CLI) can directly access the PDFlib.NET DLL without using
the PDFlib C++ binding. The source code must reference PDFlib as follows:
using namespace PDFlib_dotnet;
Unicode and legacy encoding conversion. For the convenience of PDFlib users we
show a useful C# string conversion method. Please refer to the .NET documentation for
more details. The following constructor creates a Unicode string from a byte array (at
the specified offset and length), using the encoding supplied in the Encoding parameter:
public String(sbyte*, int, int, Encoding)
38 Chapter 2: PDFlib Language Bindings (Edition for COM, .NET, and REALbasic)