Working with external documents
I'm fairly new to VB .net having only been working with it for about a month although I've a lot of programming experience with other languages.
What I'm currently doing is building COM plugins for ArcMap. The application I'm working on will store documents (jpg, doc, pdf etc.) and later retrieve them and show them to the user. At the moment they are being stored in a customised Access database table (ArcMap supports this format natively so I don't need to play with it much). When I extract the documents I have to save them to disk before opening them back up and displaying them to the user. For image files like jpg and gif files I will display them using a VB window. For other documents like Word and PDFs I need to open them up using a suitable application. This part has me stumped, how do I force the document to be opened from within VB .NET? I tried using the Shell command but it only seems to work with executables, not documents.
The only other problem I have is displaying the image files without saving them to disk first. I don't know if anyone here can help me with that though, they are extracted into a IMemoryBlobStream object which I think is a custom ESRI class. It is supposed to be able to cloned to an IStream class but it gives me a notImplentedException when I try.
