Photoshop thumbnails and CS4

Why are you telling us? We are users.

And the "Adobe kid" is probably twice your age and, even if he evades the confrontation witn M$, at least he is civil.

Photoshop CS4 works fine for the vast majority of users. It's just a few unfortunates that post here with their problems.

BTW, I too think this thumbnail problem could be solved if people got their fingers out.

This exchange is the equivalent of New York politicians calling Chicago politicians "corrupt."

Adobe in infamous for being uncooperative and difficult. Whichever supervisor let this Adobe kid post these unsupervised rude responses to the Microsoft fellow should be canned -- unfortunately, it'll take Adobe three years to be able to evaluate this situation.

Microsoft and Adobe users don't give a darn about your little bickering -- what we want is software that makes life easier -- that we don't have to think about. I don't use Photoshop so I can think about Adobe stuff -- I use it to create images.

I paid a fortune to Adobe for Photoshop. The ball is in Adobe's court -- fix it!

Bump, this is the thread where I was wondering if communication was working again... Mr Hamburg might know about the bug, too, and works in User Exeperience...

Hey David

Thumbnail providers are sort of exception, they run in their own process so it's ok to write them in managed code.

I know that IInitializeWithStream has precedence, I comment it out and leave only IInitializeWithFile, and then it does nothing. dll is called but just won't call Initialize, it just exits like there's no appropriate implementation of IInitializeWithFile.Initialize

Sorry for thread hijack but this is sort of the only chance to resolve this thing once and for all, even if it means that it can't be done. I'm on this two weeks already and I've seen that other people also have the same problem. The one thing I didn't try is to make Preview handler, because it also uses IInitializeWithFile, and it seems to be working for other people who messed with it in C#, which makes it even more weird.

These questions are a bit of a thread hijack. To bring this back to the original subject, the most frequent request we get is to do a PSD WIC codec. We have just started on it, but we should have one out in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors in Q1 of 2009.

If you're not a software developer, then you can ignore the rest of my post.

If you implement IInitializeWithStream, then IInitializeWithFile won't be called due to the precedence stated in the remarks for IThumbnailProvider.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb774614.aspx

Also, both the Shell team and the .NET CLR team discourage writing shell extensions in managed code. See the comments from folks on both teams at Microsoft on the following link.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/netfxbcl/thread/1428326d-7950-42b4-ad94-8e962124043e/

Hey Brandon, could you help me with this? Or anyone else, every bit of help is welcome.

I'm trying to implement thumbnail provider for swf (flash) files in C#, but can't get IInitializeWithFile to work. It just won't call Initialize. IInitializeWithStream works fine, but I'd really like to get the path (because swf might load external files and I can't know where to look if I'm using stream)

I've seen on couple of other forums that people have the same problem and nobody got it to work.
Here's a piece of code:

//works fine, I get the thumbnail
[ComVisible(true), Guid("b824b49d-22ac-4161-ac8a-9916e8fa3f7f"), InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)]
public interface IInitializeWithStream
{
void Initialize(IStream stream, int grfMode);
}

//doesn't work when I implement it
[ComVisible(true), Guid("b7d14566-0509-4cce-a71f-0a554233bd9b"), InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)]
public interface IInitializeWithFile
{
void Initialize([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] string pszFilePath, int grfMode);
}

For the first parameter I've tried every type that came to my mind, but couldn't get it to work.

David -

Yeah that's pretty much what I was saying in my original post :)

IInitializeWithStream is preferred for most handlers, though. It lets the handler operate over non-file objects, like files in a Zip folder, or any other namespace location that supports returning an IStream for its items. This will becomes more important going forward as we move more and more toward browsing and searching remote data, like OpenSearch locations in Windows 7.

In many cases we can create temp files to get around this (which is what Win7 does for OpenSearch locations with file-based previewers and such), but direct stream handling is preferred. We require it starting in Vista for IFilters because we lock down the filter host process so tightly that it *can't* access the file system, and so it can't mess up file access.

Previewers are another case where we prefer to host them at Low IL (like IE does with its protected mode tab processes), and if you let the shell handle getting the stream we can use very fine-grained oplocks to ensure that file access is never interrupted or blocked for other applications, merely delayed, while the file is being loaded.

So yeah, IInitializeWithStream is the best initialization pattern for a new handler as it allows you to take advantage of the many benefits of shell abstraction layer :)