Version Comparison Chart

Platforms and Languages

Operating Systems

Solid Framework requires the .NET CLR and does not support Windows 9x. Solid Framework requires .NET Framework 2.0 or later. The framework has been tested on:

• Windows XP SP2
• Windows 2003 Server
• Windows Vista

Programming Languages

Solid Framework is a CLS Compliant class library. This means that the class library only exposes features that are common across all .NET languages. For example, unsigned types and overloaded methods are not used since these features are not available in all supported languages.

For simplicity, all the samples and documentation are in C#. The other commonly used CLS Compliant languages are:

• C#
• Visual Basic .NET
• J#

Microsoft Office

PDF Creation

PDF creation is done by printing to a special printer driver like Solid PDF Creator. The Solid Framework license is valid for Solid PDF Creator too and is automatically applied.

For richer PDF creation, application specific PrintProviders exist like WordPrintProvider. This provides support for features like copying the document properties from the Word document to the PDF file automatically after printing to PDF. To support the WordPrintProvider either Office 2003 or Office 2007 (Vista) must be installed.

PDF Conversion

Converting PDF to Word can be done without having Microsoft Office installed. However, there are two features which do require Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 (Vista):

• Recognition of non-standard encoded fonts requires Office Tools (Document Imaging) for OCR
• Saving to binary .doc requires Microsoft Word (.rtf and the WordML .doc format do not require Microsoft Word)