Office 2007 Foxit PDF Previewer/Handler February 28, '07 Comments [18] Posted in Reviews | Tools Sponsored By Tim Heuer gives to the community and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Everyone's been waiting ((and waiting) and waiting) for a PDF Previewer for Outlook 2007. I'm shocked that Adobe didn't get their act together in time and release one at the time of the launch. It would have been a compelling enough reason to actually put the crapware software on my system. Well, of course you know I love Foxit Software because their tiny and glorious little PDF Reader (and PDF Creator) software keeps my computer moving fast and Adobe-(Reader) free. Update for clarity - I'm complaining about how slow Acrobat 7 is, especially with regard to all it's plugins that it starts up during the splash screen. It's true that Foxit has crashed on larger PDFs and there's some quirky rendering sometimes, but I currently still prefer it for "casual PDF'ing." As for Adobe the company, I love PhotoShop, so I'm not impugning the whole building. Now, Tim has combined the Foxit ActiveX SDK and an MSDN sample on how to create an Office Preview Handler and just called Foxit up. (The MSDN one uses Acrobat if you like.) Bam. It was done. WARNING: The PDF Previewer only works on Vista right now. Tim says via email: "The problem with XP is that the preview handler model is slightly different. In Vista, the preview handler is provided through a managed preview surrogate (you can see it running when you do a preview) called prevhost.exe. In XP, this doesn’t exist and the preview must be handled by a COM surrogate." Last year Tim wrote a Code Preview Handler (not sure if this works in XP?) so I guess I'll be collecting the best of these, methinks! Let's all go over and crush Tim's blog with comments of encouragement. And convince him to make XP versions. He says: "So, the next step for this project for me is to create the managed COM host for this code-base. I have some stuff researched…but anyone interested in providing that host is appreciated. Time is not on my side for that one." If you have the expertise and can write the unmanaged COM code, give him a shout. « Blat - Command Line Emailer saves me tim... | Blog Home | Running PowerShell Scripts from the Comm... » About Scott Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author. About Newsletter Sponsored By Hosting By