I need a control to implement scanning functionality into my VB.NET application. Does anyone have any good experience with a TWAIN toolset that will control the scanner, do some image correction, etc ect? My old trusted VFP one doesn't offer a .NET flavor.



Also, in VFP I never stored images in the database, I just stored pointers to the file locations. It always worked very well, can anyone make the argument that I should be storing the images themselves in SQL Server? They will be about 25kb per.



Thanks for any input.

Keith Chisarik

I was very curious about this question that Keith made. I used to have the images stored in the General field in my Fox applications, but then I started having the table limit reached, and swapped to poiting to addresses.

Now, in SQL, I was wondering which way to choose, and it's nice to know that stuffing them into the database will be faster. I guess that giving the option to choose would be the best way, as it is probably not a major problem to extract them from the tables if necessary to save them in a folder, with this serialization thing.

Thanks Keith and Ben.

We allow our medical system to go both ways.  This is for those users who want to run SQL Server Express and will quickly hit the 4 GB limit.  We also have an in-place conversion so that they can swap back and forth and it will automatically move the images from a folder based environment to a SQL Server stored entry and vice-versa.  Being stored in the database is faster, but if you are expecting a potential mass amount of data, you will need to provide the folder based (or file based) option as well otherwise you will start having data loss when you hit the SQL Express limit.  If you are running a full version of SQL Server then this is not a concern.