This update is focused on fixing a lot of small issues, ranging from performance to selection clipping. The full changelist, as usual, is over at the forum. Of note, the compression for .PDN files has been improved. For the tech-minded, I switched from the .NET-supplied GZipStream over to SharpZipLib’s GZipInputStream and GZipOutputStream.
At this point, the bar for fixing a bug is quite high. I’m waiting for a few translations to be finalized, but other than that the only bugs I plan to fix are for crashes and data loss.
If you’re seeing a bug that still hasn’t been fixed, and you haven’t reported it, then you should report it. Please don’t assume everyone or anyone else will see it too. I once had someone, after the v2.1 release, post on the forum that some bug still wasn’t fixed after the betas. I asked him if he’d ever reported it. “No, I just assumed you already knew about it.” Well, I didn’t – it was an obscure issue where some ATI multimonitor utility would get confused and force all of Paint.NET’s tool windows to be the wrong sizes. (The fix was actually to delete the ATI utility – honestly, they aren’t necessary after Windows 98 anyway.)
paint.net blog 
It just struck me as the beta went up on the home page that 3.5 beta 3 is a exactly 3 times larger download than 3.36.
Do betas include debugging bits, did someone forget to compress the installer, or is there really that much extra “stuff”?
I’d love to see a breakdown.
Thanks. :=D
Also, I may be missing something, but the link from the licence page (http://www.getpaint.net/license.html) to download the source goes to the download page (http://www.getpaint.net/download.html#src), which doesn’t seem to offer it.
The larger download size is comprised of, 1) more code / resources (icons), 2) bundled prerequisites like Windows Installer 3.1 and the .NET bootstrapper, and 3) inclusion of diagnostic files (*.pdb).
The first one’s unavoidable but honestly not that much (few hundred KB at most). The second one is about 2MB and the result of deciding that installation barriers should be eliminated as much as possible (I have a few older blog posts about installation difficulty). If a prereq isn’t there it’ll say “I’m going to install ___” as opposed to “You need ___ before Paint.NET will install. Good luck finding it!”
The third is something I started with the Alphas but found so valuable that I’m keeping it (about 1MB). It provides source code filenames and line numbers for crashlogs and helps me to pinpoint where a problem is with a MUCH higher degree of accuracy than before, resulting in easier to fix bugs, and therefore more fixed bugs, and therefore a higher quality app for everyone.
And at less than 5MB, it’s still well within “impulse download” aka “Why not?” range.
And, I should also add, that *no* I did not forget to compress the installer 🙂 If you look at the contents of %TEMP%\PdnSetup (when the setup wizard is open) and add up the file sizes vs. the size of the downloaded Install.exe, you’ll see almost a 5:1 ratio. I went to great lengths to ensure that the highest level of LZMA compression was being used for the entire package. The MSI, in fact, is built without compression so that LZMA can have a meaningful dictionary across the whole package (the compression algorithm supported by MSI is a simpler one). It takes my computer a full minute to build and compress the installer package — and that’s on a brand new quad-core Intel Core i7 overclocked to 3.6 GHz. And the build system is fully multithreaded.
I just dicovered The excellent paint.NET is no longer open source!!!!! What a pitty!
I strongly and sincerely regret this decision. Paint.net clearly was one of the best open source software in its category. Now it’s just becoming one among many others “image and photo editing software”.
I hope paint.Net will become open source again in the next releases.
Gandalf, Releasing the source code for Paint.NET has only brought me punishment. I don’t see it coming back.
Rick, you may want to update the web pages to reflect that fact.
Alex, I have edited the license page to be accurate. It’ll go up the next time I upload anything.
Rick, what punishment did open sourcing Paint.NET bring? Surely it’ll help if more and more people are involved in developing this great piece of software?
Philip, read my older blog entries.
@Rick: You’ll have to link the specific article about your decision. Doing a quick search yields nothing of value.
Look here:
I don’t really like the behaviour of the fonts drop down: it’s logical that you postpone the loading of the fonts (it isn’t needed for Paint.NET to work), but when you use the drop down for the first time, you see the list being loaded, which looks kinda silly to me. Wouldn’t it be a better idea to start loading the fonts once Paint.NET is started in a thread with minimal priority?
Hmm, perhaps you should license it under the GPL in order to prevent people from taking advantage of it? The FSF rigorously pursue any GPL violations and they’d be more than happy to take up the Paint.NET cause should any violations occur.
It’s a real shame to close off the source because of a few clowns. One thing I would really like would be to get Paint.NET running under Mono in Linux and having access to a more up-to-date source tree would help.
Cristan: It’s perfectly logical and works very well. Why spend time on fonts, something that involves a LOT of disk I/O, when the user might not even use that part of the UI?
Philip Goh, et. al. This isn’t a post about licensing. Any further comments on the matter will be removed.
Hi Rick,
…. Thank YOUUUUUUUUUUU …..
Marie
Wow, Rick, I have to say that the arrangement you have now for logging bugs with line numbers and everything is incredible. That’s a really great idea. Not sure how you pulled it off, but that’s really cool.
Matt, all I do is copy the *.PDB’s along next to their corresponding binary. I found this out by accident, in fact (although no doubt it is documented in great detail somewhere).
Could you add something like the “Ribbon” from MS Paint as an option in a future build?
Great work, congratulations! This release has been awaited for a long time.
Who should I contact for get some parts of the source code (if I can get some parts)?
I’m developing a chat application, and would like to use the transparent feature you have put on Paint.NET.
I’d appreciate any hint of how to do the transparent menu and forms.
Igor, the source code isn’t available.
I really don’t understand why people don’t just send an e-mail from the Contact page on the website. It sure makes more sense than picking a random blog post and leaving an unrelated comment.
Rick Brewster,
I totally support your decision of removing the availability of the source code. And I’m really sorry for the backspaceware thing that had happened to you.
I really love this app, and knowing that you once offered it as a downloadable, open source, app, that could be built by any backspaceware retard speaks highly of you.
This said, keep up the good work! 🙂
Text with DirectWrite looks great on Windows 7.
Why not use the rest of the Direct2D features as well. Should make it much faster. Yes, the interop will be hard, but maybe you can make use of the Windows 7 code pack (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack). Will probbaly help. And, now with Vista supporting Direct2D and DirectWrite, it’s probbaly very much worth it.
I’m building my own managed Direct2D app, so I can help too.
Rick, i see the plan for release before W7, didnt happen, do you have any idea of when we can expect a release? And will the Add/Remove programs small icon be fixed?
Cheers,
Danny.