The transition to .NET v4 with Paint.NET v3.5.5 has not gone as smoothly as I expected. Right after I released the beta, I immediately started receiving reports of installation problems. Now, before I go into more details, I would like to assure everyone that nothing bad was actually happening. Systems weren’t corrupted, there was no data loss, etc. These weren’t even installation failures, per se; things just weren’t connected seamlessly like they were supposed to be. Clearly it wasn’t ready for prime time.

No, the problem was much more subtle than that and sadly didn’t show up in any of my testing. The reports were along the lines of, “.NET 4 installed and then Paint.NET didn’t do its own update.” If you then tried to run the Paint.NET installer again, nothing would happen: the extractor would run, you’d get a beep, and then nothing. After a reboot, however, you could then run the installer and everything would work great.

As it turns out, on Vista and Win7, .NET 4 first requires an update to some OS components (which it installs automatically). This update, like all other OS updates (e.g., via Windows Update), will not install if a reboot is already pending from another OS update. After that, .NET 4 can install itself. Then the final kicker is that you can’t run a .NET 4-based application until after another reboot. On “Patch Tuesday” it would be very common that TWO reboots would be needed. My installer simply can’t survive across a reboot, nor do I have a desire to implement the code to enable this. I certainly can’t add this code within the timeframe of a 0.0.1 update.

As Liz Lemon on 30 Rock would say, “Nerds!”

Let’s just go ahead and get it out of our systems: blah blah blah, reboots suck, what’re those Micro$oft morons* thinking, blah blah blah, Lunix wouldn’t do that because of course it’s perfect, blah blah blah. Now, let’s go back to being adults and just accept that this is the way it works, for better or worse. Please don’t spam the comments box with tirades about reboots. I don’t know why an OS update is necessary, but I sincerely doubt the .NET folks would have done this without a really good reason.

Anyway. This wasn’t the case for .NET 3.5 SP1: even if its installer reported that a reboot was necessary, it was still possible to run the Paint.NET setup wizard (which is a .NET 3.5 SP1 app) and defer the reboot until after everything was completed. More often than not, a reboot was not needed. I think I’ve only seen a reboot needed when installing on XP, mostly when Windows Installer 3.1 also had to be installed.

So, here’s the new plan for Paint.NET v3.5.5. It will not require .NET 4. It will still be based on .NET 3.5 SP1, but with a few important changes to pave the way for a hard dependency on .NET 4. If Paint.NET detects that a reboot is pending from a system update, then it will not auto-check for updates (clicking on Check for Updates will still work as normal). This will help to avoid the confusion when .NET 4 requires a reboot before it can install. I never implemented this before simply because it wasn’t necessary.

I still want to avoid end-user confusion related to .NET’s side-by-side nature. Unlike conventional wisdom might assume, .NET 4 does not include .NET 3.5 SP1 (or 3.0, 2.0, 1.1, and 1.0), which means many people would have installed .NET 4, uninstalled .NET 3.5 SP1 (why would you need it if you have the newer version, after all?), and then hit an error from Paint.NET saying that .NET 3.5 SP1 was required. This is exactly the same problem we had when .NET 2.0 came out and Paint.NET v2.5 still required you to install .NET 1.1. Back then I got more than a few grumpy and indignant e-mails and forum posts from people and calling me bad names because of this. It didn’t even matter that Paint.NET v2.6 was a few weeks away from release at the time.

In order to avoid this confusion, Paint.NET v3.5.5 will support running on a system which has .NET 4 but not .NET 3.5 SP1 installed. However, if both of them are installed then Paint.NET will use .NET 3.5 SP1. This keeps things much simpler for myself and, especially, for plugin authors. If you really do want to run Paint.NET v3.5.5 on top of .NET 4 (and let’s face it, we all want the latest shiny stuff), that will still be possible with a minor tweak to the PaintDotNet.exe.config file: just swap the order of the <supportedRuntime> elements so that the .NET 4 one comes first.

Paint.NET v3.5.5 will still be dropping support for XP SP2 and Vista RTM (pre-SP1). I was planning to do this anyway, as it’s an important stepping stone to phasing out XP support entirely for Paint.NET v4.0. It also helps to shrink the download size by about 700 KB because now I don’t have to include Windows Installer 3.1. Less bandwidth and more simplicity lets me focus on other things that are way cooler.

Going forward, have no fear. It will still be possible for Paint.NET to install .NET 4, then itself, and then not require a reboot until the very end. This involves finessing my setup wizard to target .NET 2.0, something you can always rely on nowadays. Which really isn’t as bad as it sounds; none of my planned changes require anything more than .NET 2.0 and I’d just have to rework some places where I use LINQ or whatever. The setup wizard uses some of the other Paint.NET DLLs but I can just inline that functionality. I’m certainly not rewriting my setup wizard to use WPF or TPL. It’s just something that can’t be done without more code churn and a longer beta testing period.

Expect to see a new beta release shortly.

* I work for Microsoft too, by the way.

While porting Paint.NET v3.5.5 to .NET 4, I naturally ran head-first into the problem of making sure my two C++/CLI assemblies were targeting the client profile and not requiring the full framework. The problem here is that Visual Studio 2010 does not have a UI for setting a C++/CLI assembly’s target framework version and profile.

On MSDN, I found that someone had added a note on how to target a non-v4 version of the framework by editing or adding a <TargetFrameworkVersion> element to the VCXPROJ file. Once I saw this, I looked as the CSPROJ files for my other assemblies to see how they did it, and they were using the same element with the same value in the same location. They also used an additional element to specify which profile (Client or Full) was targeted. On a whim, I decided to guess and check to see if this same element was honored by the C++/CLI compiler, and it is!

So here we go: (this is modified from the text already at the page linked to above)

To change the version and profile of the .NET Framework for C++/CLI projects (VS 2010)

1. Right click on project in Solution Explorer and click Unload project
2. Right click on unloaded project in Solution Explorer and select Edit <projectname>.vcxproj
3. In project XML file locate node <PropertyGroup Label=”Globals”>
4. In that node locate node <TargetFrameworkVersion> (if the node cannot be found, add it)
5. Inner text of the node defines target framework. It can be v2.0,v3.0, v3.5 or v4.0
6. In that node locate node <TargetFrameworkProfile> (if the node cannot be found, add it)
7. Inner text of the node defines the target framework profile. For the Client profile, set it to Client (for Full, just omit the element)
8. Save vcxproj file and close it
9. Right click on unloaded project in Solution Explorer and click Reload Project

Example:

<PropertyGroup Label="Globals">     
    …       
    <TargetFrameworkVersion>v4.0</TargetFrameworkVersion>      
    <TargetFrameworkProfile>Client</TargetFrameworkProfile>      
</PropertyGroup>

When I mentioned that the forums were down for most of last week, I also promised it’d be worth it: we have finally moved the forum so that it’s sitting on our own hosting and not on freebie hosting. We’ve also migrated to IPB from phpBB, and will be adding and enabling more great features over the coming days and weeks.

Sorry to keep everyone in the dark, but we had to keep everyone in the dark, including our old freebie forum hosting provider.

The new address is http://forums.getpaint.net/

As with any large exodus or migration, there will be some glitches. For instance, apparently everybody on the forum was born on January 1st, 1970 🙂

Over time I’ll try to make sure all the links on this blog are pointing at the new location.

One nice thing about a big leap like this is that we can shed some dead weight. I just deleted over 16,000 accounts which had zero posts: that’s more than half the entire list of users!

About a month ago I ported the Curves adjustment UI to use Direct2D for the transfer map (the interactive spline/grid). This meant that a rectangular portion of the form was carved out for Direct2D. If you’ve used WPF interop then you’ll be familiar with “airspace limitations”, and I was curious as to whether it would be possible to put a WinForms button on top of an area that is being rendered to with Direct2D. In other words, if you use Direct2D to render to an area of a Form, does it completely take over that rectangular area?

Now, you can always take a guess, “Well of course you could/couldn’t do that because of explanation involving logical deduction or other example setting precedent.” For engineering purposes, however, something like this must be shown to work before taking a dependency on it.

And what do you know, it does work:

This screenshot shows a Form that contains a single control of type “D2DThingy.” That control then has 5 children controls of various types, and they are all stock WinForms controls. Clearly, they are able to coexist peacefully and without artifacts like clipping or flickering. Like with any WinForms UI there is still a lot of work to make sure that the background of the Button matches up with what’s behind it, etc. but that is a known problem with known solutions.

This is of special importance to me because I want to write a new toolbar UI for Paint.NET v4.0. However, I absolutely do not want to write my own ComboBox or TextBox controls. I could spend a full 12 months on a globalized TextBox that can work with all languages, input types, etc. Thankfully I won’t have to.