OLE container surrogate for .NET

• Download source code

Introduction  

Microsoft Visual Basic versions 6.0 and 5.0 provide an OLE container control for embedding OLE objects directly on forms. The OLE container control provides a means for embedding OLE objects such as Microsoft Excel workbooks, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and Microsoft Word documents. But Visual Studio .NET does not provide an OLE container control for Windows Forms: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304562/. Microsoft recommends achieving a similar functionality by using the Microsoft WebBrowser control to host the document if the document uses ActiveX. Excel, PowerPoint, and Word all support ActiveX. Therefore, documents from those sources may be displayed by using the WebBrowser control.

But the WebBrowser control doesn't embed Office documents because of security problems.

The PreviewContainer control solves this problem.  

Possibilities:    

• preview MS Office documents (Excel, Word, PowerPoint and etc) 
• preview and zooming different image formats like .jpg, .bmp and etc
• preview and browsing multi-paged .tif files 
• preview file formats which WebBrowser control support like .htm, .xml, and etc.
• developers can extend PreviewContainer control for support different file formats 

Screenshots  

Excel document preview:

Multipages TIFF preview:

Background

Solution is based on preview handlers mechanism:

• Hosting Preview Handlers in Windows Forms Applications
• View Data Your Way With Our Managed Preview Handler Framework
  

Using the code

Using of this control is very simple: 

1. Add a reference to PreviewsHandlers.dll
2. Drop the PreviewContainer on a Windows Form 
3. Call the CreateLink method of the control with the full file path:
C#

this.previewContainer.CreateLink(@"c:\test.tif");

4. If you want to browse multi-paged content (like multi-page tif), you can use these methods:
C#

((IPaginalPreviewHandlerHost)this.previewContainer).PreviousPage();
	((IPaginalPreviewHandlerHost)this.previewContainer).NextPage();