It annoyed me for years that a nice edit->run->preview cycle with pdfTeX and Adobe Acrobat isn’t possible. It annoyed me so much that I downloaded the Acrobat SDK and hacked a small plugin. The plugin opens the PDF file, creates a new document in memory, copies all pages from the file to the new document and then closes the file. Now the file can be updated by pdfTeX. When the file is viewed again the plugin replaces the pages in the document previously created in memory. The current page, scroll position and zoom are preserved!

To install the plugin copy AcroOpenEx.api to the Acrobat plugin directory (e.g., C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat X.X\Acrobat\plug_ins). Note that the plugin requires the Professional or Standard edition of Acrobat, because Adobe has disabled loading plugins in Acrobat Reader.

The plugin has a built-in DDE server. To configure it for TeXnicCenter do the following:
Goto Build->Define Output Profiles… and click Viewer:

To update Acrobat in the background without switching input focus to Acrobat replace ”%bm.pdf”,1 by ”%bm.pdf”,0.

Download: acroopenex-20080514.zip