Today I found a very cool open source project on SourceForge. iTextSharp is a DotNet 1.1 port of iText, which is a Java library for PDF creation. I found that it updates to VS2005 just fine and is very easy to use, at least for simple tasks (I'll let you know about more complex ones later on :)

Double kudos to those responsible for putting this great library together.

For example, creating a PDF document with iTextSharp is this easy:

Imports iTextSharp.text
Imports iTextSharp.text.pdf
Imports System.IO

Partial Class docs_PrintSurvey
  Inherits System.Web.UI.Page

  Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
      Dim oDocument As New Document

      Dim sFileName As String = "c:\inetpub\myapp\temp\test.pdf"
      PdfWriter.GetInstance(oDocument, New FileStream(sFileName, IO.FileMode.Create))

      oDocument.Open()
      oDocument.Add(New Paragraph("Hello World!"))
      oDocument.Close()

      Response.Redirect("http://mypc:1770/myapp/temp/test.pdf")
  End Sub
End Class