What do you get when you take all the best of LEADTOOLS and wrap it up in an app? The LEADTOOLS Doc Scanner App. A combination of the award-winning LEADTOOLS Recognition, Document, and Imaging engines bring to life an app built by the developers here at LEAD that gives you the ability to accomplish any task with images and documents all in the palm of your hand!

One of the new features of the latest LEADTOOLS V19 update is a re-factored load algorithm, which has resulted in greatly reduced load times of documents formats such as PDF, MS-Office formats 97-2013 (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), and TXT. The increase in speed is directly related to the number of pages in the document; the more pages, the greater the increase of speed.

Below is a C# code snippet showing how to use the new feature with the new bits marked.

Visual Studio Magazine today announced the winners of its 23rd annual Reader's Choice Awards. The 2016 winners are chosen by the readers of Visual Studio Magazine and honor the best Visual Studio- and .NET Framework-related tools and services in 36 categories.

After being in this industry for a while, it's always fun when new hires and college recruits come in with varying degrees of experience. Some are well-versed in the SDK world, while others are dead-set on using notepad and doing everything from scratch. This gave us the idea to come up with 10 reasons to use an imaging SDK, or even just an SDK in general. So here they are in a semi-particular order, because many of them build off of or hinge upon the first two:

1. Save time. Many features found in imaging SDKs such as OCR, Barcode, Forms, DICOM, PACS, etc. would take years to develop on your own. Using an SDK can shorten your development life cycle to less than a month.
2. Save money. In the business world, most of us don't have the luxury of waiting years to develop a product. The time saved by using an SDK can easily recoup the development costs since you can start selling your product much earlier.
3. Two heads are better than one. SDKs let you borrow from another developer's expertise so you can focus on yours.
4. Nothing new under the sun. No sign of disrespect, but your project or something similar to it has probably been done before. A well-respected SDK with a wide user-base has valuable insight and experience that could help you with more than just calling its functions.
5. Dependable libraries have already gone through the wringer. This is especially true for established commercial libraries and oftentimes less for open-source. When an SDK is that company's line of business, you can trust that they have tested it and ensured its quality across a wide variety of platforms, images, and scenarios.
6. Expand your customer base. SDKs can give you a greater confidence in bidding on more diverse projects, tapping in to additional revenue sources.
7. Easy cure for feature creep. Usually looked upon as a negative in the development process, feature creep can be handled with grace and ease with the right SDK. Impress your bosses and clients with how fast you can go with the flow and expand your project's scope.
8. Easy to find help. The more popular an SDK is, the easier it will be to find help using it. This can be directly through that SDK's customer service, 3rd party forums, blogs, or even bringing in contract work for your project.
9. Compliance. Ever looked through the specifications for a file format? How about DICOM? Beyond the baseline complications of decoding and encoding information correctly, vertical markets such as health care and government require a high level of security and compliance that an SDK will help navigate and keep your product in line with.
10. Fun! This may be more subjective and personality-dependent, but I think the vast majority of us find great satisfaction in trying new things and creating a variety of projects. Rather than working on one thing for an extended time, using SDK can open up the door to completing many different projects over the course of your programming career.

If we've somehow convinced you in this post, or if you were already attune to the benefits of using an imaging SDK, you can take a deeper look and learn why you should choose LEADTOOLS as your imaging SDK provider.

Visual Studio Magazine has published its annual Reader's Choice Awards and LEADTOOLS was once again declared a winner for the 11th straight year. The survey was conducted in August with nearly 500 readers casting their votes and giving their opinions about their favorite productivity enhancers. In 2013, over 400 products were in the running, and LEAD Technologies is proud to have emerged as a winner in three categories.

• Gold Medal in Component: Imaging, Image Processing & Drawing Tools —
  LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro
• Silver Medal in Component: Text, OCR, Scanning & Barcode —
  LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Suite
• Bronze Medal in Mobile Development Tools and Frameworks —
  Windows Phone SDK technology in LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro and above

To see the full article from Visual Studio Magazine, you can download the PDF from their website.