Early in my career I created a custom document storage solution as part of several of my applications. This led to the Clarion Imaging Templates and later the Imageman Templates, both using third party OCX's. Recently one of those customers wanted some enhancements to their application, and I decided I would rather spend a couple of days converting the application into WinDev, than adding features in C6 that are built into WinDev. My first step was to explore the possibilities of using WinDev native functions to create a document viewer instead of using a third party library. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was and how much functionality was supported directly by WinDev.  The resulting Document Viewer is very light weight and handles most of the normal requirements, its not as powerful as I would like, put it will do for this project until I create a Document Viewer using a third party .net library at some point in the future. At the end of the article you will find a download link for the Component and the source code.

Many of my clients are asking for updated applications and modern features, that they have seen in some of my latest WinDev Applications. As I began making proposals for several of these conversion projects, I realized that I need a standard general comparison of some of the look and feel, and features that would be include in any application that I convert from Clarion to WinDev. The article that follows is the basis of that comparison.