Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Burned by Canon’s Dirty E18 Secret

Published on September 30, 2005 in Geek. 29 Comments

If you, like many others, have been burned by Canon’s E18 error, there are some class action investigations going on that you might be interested in:

  • I found the following embedded within an Amazon.com review: “If you would like to join the Lawsuit against Canon for “Memory card error” OR “E18″ error CALL ATTORNEY JIM SMITH AT NO COST TO YOU REGARDING THE E18 ERROR. THERE IS A POSSIBLE CLASS ACTION SUIT.HIS NUMBER IS 1-877-667-9489. This was posted at cnet.”
  • And I got this from DP Review: Girard Gibbs, who filed the class-action suit against Apple about the iPod’s Dirty Secret, is doing an investigation of the Canon E18 issue. You can send him feedback here.

Here’s what I sent Girard:

I purchased the Canon PowerShot SD300 in January 2005. In early September 2005, I tried to turn the camera on, and got the infamous “E18″ error – there was an error message reading “E18″ on the screen, and the lens would not open.

My fiance called Canon two weeks ago and explained the problem to a customer service representative there. After hearing the explanation, the rep told my fiance that the repair would be covered under our 1-year warranty, and that we should send the camera along with a copy of the warranty card to an address which he provided. We followed his instructions and sent the camera in to Canon.

Today, having heard nothing from Canon, my fiance called their repairs department to check on the status of our camera. He was informed that the repair would not be covered under our warranty after all, and that Canon would repair it for us for $117. And, if we choose not to have it repaired, Canon will charge $20 to simply mail it back to us.

The most frustrating part of this situation is that we would not have sent the camera back to Canon if we had not been reassured that the repair would be covered under the warranty. My fiance explained this to the rep he spoke with today, but to no avail.

I am very interested in pursuits of a class action lawsuit against Canon. I have read that this is a widespread problem that Canon has known about for many versions now and has not fixed.

Feel free to contact me if you have further questions. Thanks.

So now Canon joins the list of Companies Whose Products I Will Not Purchase, along with Apple.

Update 10/03/2005 1:21 PM: Kenny spoke to a more accomodating customer service rep today. While they still want to charge us for the repair, they have discounted the service cost, and are doing a rush order for us at no extra cost. While I’m still uneasy about it (there’s no reason this won’t randomly happen again in a few months), I’m relenting for now.

Basically I have no conviction.

What Happened to NavigationApplication?

Published on September 14, 2005 in Avalon. 0 Comments

I’m not sure how many of you at PDC have already installed “The Goods” CD that you received. When you do, and you start porting your WPF apps to this build, you’ll notice that the NavigationApplication class no longer exists. Don’t panic! All of the navigation features that you know and love are still around, and their usage model hasn’t changed much either. Before I go into too much detail on the change, here’s some background on the problems we had with the old Application/NavigationApplication split:

  1. The decision of Application vs. NavigationApplication has little to do with whether or not the app uses navigation – Applications may use NavigationWindows, and NavigationApplications may use regular Windows. So why make the choice? Since the decision of whether or not to use navigation really happens at the Window level, not the app level, we’d rather let developers make the decision per window.
  2. There was no way to create a markup-only application using the vanilla Application class.
  3. When using NavigationApplication and setting the StartupUri, there was no way to set properties on the MainWindow before it was shown.
  4. People were confused about when to use an Application vs. a NavigationApplication. This is in large part because there were only 3 main differences between the two: Startup behavior, the Properties collection, and Navigation events.

Given these known drawbacks, we set out to provide one Application class that solves the problems above and still meets all of your app-management needs. The main changes are as follows:

  • Moved StartupUri to Application – providing this property on the Application object maintains the existing startup behavior for NavigationApplications, and helps us enable the markup-only non-navigation Hello World scenario.
  • Changed how StartupUri works – if the XAML specified has a Window at the root, we’ll create the Window (no navigation occurs); if the file has a Page at the root, we’ll create the NavigationWindow implicitly and navigate to the Page.
    • Window –> create the Window (don’t navigate)
    • NavigationWindow –> create the NavigationWindow (don’t navigate)
    • Page –> create NavigationWindow and navigate
  • Moved Navigation events and Properties collection to Application

In general, most people have found the change relatively easy to adapt to, and they are appreciative of this simplification of the API. The most common migration path will simply be replacing your <NavigationApplication> tags with <Application> tags — and then everything should just work as it did before. If it turns out to be more difficult for you, or you have any questions about how to migrate, please let me know.

Logistical Details for My PDC Session

Published on September 9, 2005 in Avalon. 0 Comments

I posted the abstract for my talk about a month ago, but now we actually have all the logistical information available too:

PRS314 – Windows Presentation Foundation (”Avalon”): Using Application Services
September 14, 5:00 PM – 6:15 PM
150/151 (Hall E)
Lauren Lavoie

Learn how to use Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly codename “Avalon”) application-level services for data management, system interaction, hosting, and UI to create great client applications. See how to create both standalone client applications and rich browser applications that can take advantage of these services. Gain guidance for using application-level services, such as when your application should be hosted in the browser or a standalone window, whether or not to write a navigation-based application, and how to manage application data and settings for various scenarios.

I hope to see you there next Wednesday!

PDC Bloggers

Published on September 8, 2005 in Avalon. 0 Comments

A great place to check out all the PDC action (whether you’ll be at the Convention Center with us or not) is PDCBloggers.net. They have aggregated feeds from speakers, staff, attendees, and community members. I expect that you’ll see tons of good WPF content over there during the coming week.

Welcome Home, Shawnie

Published on September 8, 2005 in Family. 0 Comments

My little brother has returned from his summer in Yellowstone, and has rejoined civilization. Apparently one of the first things he did when he got back was post all of his photos from the summer. Good stuff there — check it out if you are curious about what Old Faithful and the Grand Tetons look like.

I’m excited to see my brother tomorrow evening, as I’m en route to PDC.

Why Doesn’t WPF Support MDI?

Published on September 8, 2005 in Avalon. 12 Comments

A few people have asked me why the WPF builds that we’ve released don’t include support for MDI. On one hand, I still want to do this for V1. On the other, I can’t imagine making people wait any longer before we ship this thing, on account of adding “just one more feature.”

I do want to call out that the absence of MDI support in WPF does not at all imply that we don’t think this is important. Nor does it mean that we can’t add it in the next version if it doesn’t make it in for V1. There are a couple of factors influencing this decision:

  • Shipping. As I’m sure you know, software projects are always a game of making tradeoffs. Tradeoffs between features and other features, between features and bug fixes, between features and ship dates, and so on. MDI will be a huge feature if we implement it right (and implementing it right in this case means making it a true first-class citizen of WPF, so that it integrates well with styling, the property system, etc.), and at some point we had to decide between adding this new large feature and shipping the product.
  • Chocolate or vanilla? There are probably about 20 “flavors” of MDI. Word does MDI differently from Excel, Excel does MDI differently from Visual Studio, Visual Studio does MDI differently from Firefox (and yes, you might have caught on to my implication that I think tabbed browsing is just another flavor of MDI), Firefox does MDI differently from OneNote. In fact, a lot of apps use their own custom plumbing for MDI because the flavor provided by the API platform isn’t quite the right one. Before we go implement something as monolithic as MDI, we want to make sure that we choose the right flavor — or do it in a flexible enough way so that our developers can customize it to meet their needs. I don’t think any of us really knows the right way to do this yet — a big part of this needs to come from understanding the needs of customers who are actually building on WPF (that’s you, and hence the ask for feedback at the end of this post).

So what if you want to build an MDI app now? Not all is lost, because there are ways around the limitation. Here are the two that I expect to be most common:

  1. Use Windows Forms interop. Nick Kramer describes how to do this, with a quick code sample, in this blog post.
  2. Bake it yourself. This is not as impossible as it sounds. In fact, a lot of apps out there do this today, because they want a different “flavor” of MDI than what comes out of the box with Win32/MFC/WinForms. Chris Anderson’s AvPad makes use of a custom implementation of a child window manager, and Chris claims it wasn’t hard to do. <g>

If there is sufficient interest, I’d be very happy to write up a sample for current external bits showing #2 above — using Chris’s AvPad as a starting point, but really highlighting how to write the child window manager code. My only caveat is that this would happen after PDC. :)

I’d also love feedback from those of you who are hurting by not having this support now. In particular — what’s your scenario, and what “flavor” of MDI are you looking to produce? Is it more like Excel, Word, Visual Studio, or something else entirely?

PDC Panel: What’s Next for Microsoft’s Web Platform

Published on September 6, 2005 in Avalon. 0 Comments

I’ll be participating in the following panel at the PDC next week:

PNL06 – What’s Next for Microsoft’s Web Platform
September 16, 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
152/153 (Hall F)
Eric Deily, Eric Feagler, Lauren Lavoie, Mike Volodarsky, Nikhil Kothari, Omar Khan, Shanku Niyogi

Will emerging technologies such as Atlas and IIS7 create an environment for new types of web applications, if so what challenges and opportunities will developers face? How is ASP.NET evolving? What role will Avalon Express play in this space? Join us for a conversation with a panel of Microsoft experts on what promises to be a lively discussion on the state of web application development.

This should be an exciting panel. We plan to make it worth getting up early for. :)

If you have any questions that you’d like to hear us answer during this panel, please either leave a comment or drop me a line.

Dispatches from Slidell, Louisiana

Published on September 1, 2005 in Family. 0 Comments

Kenny’s dad lives in Slidell, LA, one of the cities that was hit the hardest by Hurricane Katrina. Gary actually stayed in Slidell during the hurricane because he was on call at the hospital (he is a general surgeon there). His wife, Lynn, went to stay with her family in another part of the state.

As you might expect, we had a couple of rather anxious days directly before, during, and after the hurricane. There was no telephone access to the hospital (and there still isn’t), and we didn’t have any indication of whether it was even still standing. We all just assumed that their house must be gone.

Little by little, we’ve learned more about the situation at the hospital in Slidell: first, Lynn saw a news broadcast including footage of the hospital, which confirmed that it was still standing. Then, she got a second-hand message from Gary that not only was everyone at the hospital okay, but their house was still standing! (presumably he was able to get out of the hospital to go check it out? We’re all still confused by that one, because all of the articles I’ve read state that there’s still about 8 ft of flooding outside the hospital).

And today, I got the following updates from Kenny (via Lynn):

Dad fixed the hospital generator so they have power again and they have hot water (he was able to get a shower in), plus he fixed the roof of the house. :)

Lynn’s supposedly working out of the Baton Rouge office and is going to go back to Slidell with a generator and air conditioning unit for Dad and they’re going to either set up shop at the house or both stay at the hospital. Supposedly he’s enjoying all the help he’s able to provide here.

Awesome.