We have a requirement for PDF generation on the fly in our .NET Azure application, and have determined that PDFLib best meets our requirements.
Basic deployment is dll based, and so should be relatively straightforward. While researching the issue, I came across a case-study covering installation of another, similar component (AbcPdf, here), and this led me to wonder if anybody had any similar detailed experience to share regarding getting PDFLib up and running on a cloud service?
Specifically, I'm interested in whether there are any files other than the referenced .dlls which have to be copied with the package, whether I need to install PDFLib to the GAC using a startup command, and if there are any issues getting licensing working in a cloud environment.
We could of course use a VM for this if required, but initially I am looking to use a standard worker role. I am going to ask PDFLib support this question and will share any answer I get here, as I haven't found this topic covered anywhere else on Stackoverflow.
This is what I got back from PDF Lib support, which I think covers everything:
Does the .NET PDFLib require GAC deployment, or can the dlls simply be copied to the server?
you can simple deploy the pdflib_dotnet dll.
Are there any files other than the referenced dlls which need to be deployed for PDFLib to work?
no, PDFlib do not have any further dependencies.
How can we authenticate our product license in an environment where we may not be able to run an installer, and where we may not have access to the windows registry?
there are multiple ways to to this. The most simple way is to apply the license key in the code. You can also apply a licensefile. Please get in mind, you need for each serve, where PDFlib run in production usage a separate license. For example, when you run the application in a cluster system with 4 nodes (servers), you need 4 licenses.
And, do you have any general guidance on cloud deployments such as this?
we do not have any special comments on this. But I'm sure, you will find a lot of relevant information about the concepts of our PDFlib .NET implementation in the "PDFlib in .NET Howto", which is included in the PDFlib 8 package, and also available on our website: http://www.pdflib.com/en/developer/technical-documentation/pdflib-in-net-howto/