I am building a visual studio vb.net winforms application.
Is it possible to query and display documents in a grid on a form and then open a document from a link in the grid?
That is definitely possible with the SDK. To query for documents use the RepositoryAccess library. To open the documents with the desktop client you would use Client Automation Tools or the command line interface. You can find sample code for opening documents in this presentation. To open the documents in Web Access, see this help page for information on constructing urls.
Is it possible to open a document outside of the laserfiche client?
I would like to click on the document in my application and open it without opening laserfiche.
Yes, you can use the SDK to download the document content to a temporary file and open it in the native application. If the document is an edoc (office document/pdf/etc) you can just export the edoc file. If the document is a Laserfiche document you can export the pages as a PDF or multipage tiff.
Do you have any sample code for doing this?
There is sample code for exporting documents in the SDK, in Samples\CSharp\DocumentExporter. It uses Laserfiche.DocumentServices.DocumentExporter to export pages as JPG and PDF. To export the edoc portion of a document, call DocumentExporter.ExportElecDoc.