The attached file contains a couple of procedures that you can add to your application that will start either DBBuilder or DBExplorer up with the workspace that is currently in use by your application. This is mainly for when you are working on a client's system, just to save you all that tedious mucking about with starting the utilities from an Explorer or Command Prompt window and going through the workspace selection dialog.
Oh yeah, it also sets dbAdminMode to DDB automatically for you. Of course, if the sysadmin has locked down HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, that won't do you much good. (This last weekend I ran into a system where I was locked out of REGEDIT, but the program could still write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, so this did the trick.)
If you've subclassed the Panel class, that would be a good place to put these procedures, then you can just set up secret shortcut keys, toolbar buttons or menu options to activate the utilities. The only thing these depend on is the classic DoStartDocument procedure which is included if you don't happen to already have it.
This should work on any version of VDF (tested on 12.1 and 14.0).