Process.Start(/* path to pdf */) doesn't work with Adobe Reader on Windows 8

c# process.start adobe-reader
DaveDev picture DaveDev · May 21, 2014 · Viewed 7.4k times · Source

I'm able to create PDFs in my C#/WPF application and run them with the following:

Process.Start(_pathToPDFFile);

This works with Adobe Acrobat, but not with Adobe Reader. When Adobe Reader is installed, Process.Start() does nothing unless the Reader process is already running in the Task Manager.

How can I get Adobe Reader to show the PDF when I attempt to start a PDF?

Answer

Borislav Ivanov picture Borislav Ivanov · Sep 4, 2017

In our case, the problem was only reproducible when starting the application from Visual Studio - starting the .exe directly works as expected.

After some debugging, it turned out that Visual Studio was set to always run as administrator, which causes the issue. Turning this off (which is hard enough itself) fixes the problem.

Still not sure why this happens, though.

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