It feels good when you work with a feature team (Dev/Test/PM) and bring a new system to life. In Windows 8.1, I worked with a great team of developers and testers to add a new API family to the Windows Runtime. These are the new PDF APIs for supporting rendering of PDF content in Windows Store apps. The APIs are of two flavors:
- pure WinRT APIs that can be accessed from any WinRT-supported language like JavaScript, C#, C++ etc and
- a “native” API that can be accessed only from C++.
Watch out for my column in the December edition of the MSDN Magazine that talks a bit more in detail about these APIs and the need to have two flavors.
Anyways, more to the point. When my team was beginning to think about these APIs, one of the underlying aspirations was to enable external partners, developers or anyone who is interested in extending the APIs be allowed to do so. I think the community is taking baby steps in that direction!
One of the first extensions on the APIs is a new PDF XAML control built by the awesome folks at DevExpress. They have built a new control, named as the PDF-Viewer (aptly I think) that allows any XAML app to simply drag-drop a UI control and bind to a PDF document source. It really is that simple. This control is built over the native API that draws Pdf content directly to a DirectX backed drawing surface. Right now head over to the site, download the bits and start playing with them.
This week also marks my movement away from the Windows team. I have moved over the Visual Studio group here in India and will be working on the next big thing. Just don’t ask what it is 
-Sridhar
Does the PDF API reading the whole document into memory? LoadFromStreamAsync seems to use a lot of memory if the document is large.