I need to show the thumbnail preview of a selected .DWG file from my server and/or hard drive by simply passing a path to some function or series of functions. I've looked everywhere online for a simple example of this and get the runaround and very difficult, sometimes wrong answers from everywhere. I even searched here for the words "thumbnail" and "preview" and nothing came up. There has to be a simple way to pass a filename (with path) to something that turns the DWG thumbnail (AutoCADS preview) into a bitmap that can then be shown in a picture box. Can anyone give me some insight as to how to do this? Preferably without mentioning the DWGthumbnail.OCX way of doing it? I heard that won't work in later versions of AutoCAD. I currently use C3D 2007 but want to "look to the future" in my programs. If a simple install of AutoCAD allows Windows Explorer to show these thumbnails with a simple click on a filename, I assume it can be done with VB.net for use inside of AutoCAD.
Thanks for any help on this.