Printing using WPF is rather straight forward,, but it requires a bit of work + in the case of BSA we need Print Control, Preview, Paper Printer, PDF Generator and Web Pages. In many modern companies they have a preference for PDF or Web pages rather than paper documents these days. I have done this before with C++/MFC and it was very easy + I just ran a sample test with WPF for FixedDocuent – the process seems to be that you print to a xps document and then stream that out – I will figure it out. The more difficult part will be to assemble BSA diagrams on pages to create an user controlled document. This task will probably take a bit of time to get right. In the old MFC you just created a PrintDC rather than CDC and drew the diagrams on that – I get the impression that WPF/XPS is similar.
It exist a few WPF examples created by Microsoft – this FixedDocument example (below) is one of them and seems to be perfect for Preview/Print on paper. I will have to adapt to the XPS system, but that should be straight forward. I am thinking of maybe using a “content list” to include diagrams or print pages as we create the document. The use can this way control the content, but not all of the details and WYSIWYF parts. I think this is a workable solution. Another possible option is that I use BSA to create visual document pages and generate them in XPS – that also is straight forward, but one does not exclude the other. I can start with a simple, workable solution and build on that.
