Sandip's Programming Zen

Lately I ran into a problem where I created a feature where user can view PDF within a winform application. To do that I first used a web browser control since it was a simple solution where you just need to provide pdf path to the navigate property. That works without problem on Win XP (32bit) , but as soon as user runs it on his Vista (64 bit) OS  , it behaved different , that said, pdf opens but in a separate window, which looks bit odd, so must be fixed.

To solve that problem , I have removed web browser control and placed Acrobat Reader control (assuming that all of my users will have at least Adobe reader installed). Now that again worked well on Win XP but simply crashed on Vista (64 bit).  Reason was Acrobat reader control is an ActiveX control which is 32 bit component , that won’t work on a 64 bit OS. After looking around for some time and find out there is no 64 bit version of Acrobat reader, I discovered that I have to make sure that my win form app runs under 32 bit process on a 64 bit OS. To, do that you have to change Target Platform property of your project (See screenshot below).

Bottom line is if you have any project dependencies which only works on 32 bit environment, you have to change your project’s target platform to run only under 32 bit process. That will make your app work fine on both 32 bit and 64 bit OSes.