Inventor View and thumbnails

One of the uses of the Inventor View product is to view the thumbnails of Inventor files in Windows Explorer without having to install the full Inventor product on the machine.

With Inventor View 2011 there is a small hiccup in this scenario. And here is a neat little trick to avoid that hiccup.

When you only install Inventor View 2011 on a machine, initially you won't see the thumbnails.

Unlike Inventor View 2010, Inventor View 2011 doesn’t seem to install the file “Dtdv.exe” which is part of the Design Assistant functionality.

The easiest way to get the thumbnails, is to copy the Dtdv.exe file from an existing Inventor 2011 installation and paste it on your Inventor View machine.

After you run dtdv.exe once, the file gets registered correctly and you will get thumbnails from then on.