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Preface to 2.0 SP1

ClearCanvas Workstation 2.0 SP1 fixes four bugs, all related to non-square pixels, as described in ClearCanvas Product Bulletin 002.  The potential impact of the bugs was determined to be significant enough to warrant a service pack.

In case you are wondering why there is a version 2.0 SP1 when you never got to see 2.0, it's because 2.0 was an internal release; the last public release was 1.5 SP1.

The ClearCanvas Team

February 2010

Preface to 2.0

With ClearCanvas Workstation 2.0, we introduced support for memory management, Multiplanar Reconstruction, launching external applications, among other features.  Yes, they're big ticket end-user features, but as usual we have strived to make them just as easily consumed by developers.  The memory management API allows your large objects to register with the manager and become part of the solution when operating under heavy memory loads.  The external applications framework allows you to write custom launcher code if the desired application needs more than just command line arguments.  The MPR component is just a specialization of an ImageViewer, and most of the concepts that apply to the Image Viewer Architecture also apply to MPR.

Perhaps the only real changes that might affect any existing code are ImageViewer layout-related, and that was because we needed to do some refactoring to implement splitting images into separate display sets based on modality-specific information, like MR echoes and such.

Overall, there are much fewer breaking changes in this release as compared to the previous one, and we hope you will continue to give us feedback on the new APIs!

The ClearCanvas Team

January 2010

Preface to 1.5 SP1

ClearCanvas Workstation 1.5 SP1 fixes a calculation bug in polygonal regions of interest (ClearCanvas Product Bulletin 001).  The potential impact of the bug was determined to be significant enough to warrant a service pack to specifically address the issue.  The API itself has not changed, so any existing code written for 1.5 will compile against 1.5 SP1 without additional changes.

The ClearCanvas Team

September 2009

Preface to 1.5

ClearCanvas Workstation 1.5 introduces support for some major features of DICOM – key object selection documents, softcopy presentation states, text annotations, display shutters, overlays, and more.  In adding these features, we discovered various shortcomings in the ImageViewer.Graphics and ImageViewer.InteractiveGraphics namespaces, as well as the usability of the user-drawn measurement graphics (ImageViewer.InteractiveGraphics.RoiGraphic, in particular).  The end result was a complete redesign of the "Interactive Graphics", and to a lesser degree, the primitive graphics.

Another area of the code that suddenly needed some tuning was the StudyManagement namespace, mainly Sop and ImageSop.  Basically, the need to add support for non-image sop instances exposed a design flaw that actually had no reasonable resolution without making some architecture changes.  Don't worry, client code still deals entirely with Sop and ImageSop, but if you've written your own IStudyLoader, you'll need to make a few changes.  It should port over to the new design rather nicely, though!

As always, we believe these changes are worthwhile, since they only lead to a better overall framework design.  Please continue to let us know how we're doing by posting on our forums!

The ClearCanvas Team

July 2009

Preface to 1.3

Most of the new features in ClearCanvas Workstation 1.3 are related to the end-user experience - namely streamed images from ClearCanvas ImageServer.  On the developer side, most of the changes this time around related to lesser-used parts of the framework with one large exception – DICOM support is now fully provided by a native .NET DICOM toolkit (based upon Colby Dillion's public domain library – thanks Colby!), and the managed wrapper for the OFFIS DCMTK toolkit has been removed.

Other major additions include the new CompositeUndoableCommand class (which allows the combination of multiple commands into a single atomic undoable command) and the deprecation of the GetTag methods on the SOP classes (now superseded by the new indexer properties).  Additionally, we've made a number of changes to the Desktop.Tree classes, removing a number of the special case delegates, and simplified a number of the ImageViewer.StudyManagement collection classes, making them simply lists of their element type rather than lists of key-value pairs.

We believe these changes should make it easier to code using those parts of the Framework.  Please continue to provide feedback on our forums!

The ClearCanvas Team

November 2008

Preface to 1.2

We introduced a couple of high visibility features in ClearCanvas Workstation 1.2, namely a clipboard and thumbnails.  To support these two features we made  some API changes/additions to the existing Framework.  To allow developers to add their own tools to the clipboard, we've exposed a few types in the ClearCanvas.ImageViewer.Clipboard assembly, such as Clipboard and IClipboardToolContext.

We believe the clipboard is a powerful feature, as it allows users to "clip" interesting images to it and do something useful with them later.  We've implemented two "something useful" clipboard tools as examples, namely Export to Image and Export to Video. But what we're really hoping for is that developers will write new tools to add to the clipboard and contribute them back to the community.  New tools might include printing, sending, image sharing, etc. – use your imagination!

The ClearCanvas Team

July 2008

Preface to 1.1

Users of ClearCanvas Workstation 1.1 will notice that we've added a slew of new features, such as reference lines, synchronized stacking, an elliptical ROI, etc.  We were quite surprised by how little time it took to add these tools – just a couple of months – which was a validation of the time we spent building the Framework.  In the course of consuming our own API ("eating our own dog food", as they say), we ran into bugs we had to fix, as well as some new features we had to add.  We've incorporated all of these changes into ClearCanvas Framework SDK 1.1.  A couple of the more significant additions include support for multiframe images and the addition of some new graphics primitives, like ellipses and arcs.  We've had to make some breaking changes, but hopefully plugin developers won't find it too painful to upgrade their plugins to the new SDK.

Do continue to let us know how we're doing by posting on our forums!

The ClearCanvas Team

April 2008

Preface to 1.0

If this is your first time using the ClearCanvas SDK, you're in luck, because you get to start fresh! :) However, if you've been keeping up with all our code changes over the past year, you'll know that the code base has been a fast moving target, as we've made countless changes to the architecture and APIs in an effort to get the code to a state where most of the common use cases can be easily satisfied. If you're still with us, we thank you for hanging in there!  We know it's been tough, but we hope that this first official release of the SDK will be a decent base from which to evolve the API.

In the future, there will, of course, be changes as we go along, as we discover new use cases and as we hear from you, our users, as to what you would like to see in the API. But we will try our best to keep the number of breaking changes (i.e., those where we remove methods or change method signatures) to a minimum.

Because it's virtually impossible to anticipate everything that needs to go into a guide such as this, we encourage you to post on one of our forums if you have questions that this guide doesn't address.

Happy coding!

The ClearCanvas Team

January 2008