I've made some long overdue changes to this blog, thanks mainly to me being sick and therefore unable to go out.

Despite this post's title looking a bit like a spam subject line, this is a serious post about an issue we ran into today at work. We have a stored procedure that gathers some statistics for us, and a really strange thing was happening with it. When run from SSMS, it took less than one second to execute, but when run from code, it actually timed out while executing over two minutes. Why would it run so fast through SSMS and yet so slow through our code?

The long wait is over, and Windows 7 has finally been posted on MSDN and Technet for your downloading pleasure. However, many people couldn't wait until today and decided to download one or more leaked copies. While I don't condone such things, I still want to ensure that those people didn't download viruses or other malware from untrusted sources.

Therefore, I urge everyone to check their SHA-1 hashes against the official Microsoft ones.

If you haven't heard about the Windows 7 activation hack yet, you will soon. Journalists are already busy blowing it out of proportion, saying things like "in no time, you will be able to buy a copy of Windows 7 in China or Vietnam for less than a dollar" (CNET) and "despite all the posturing and puff, at no point during the Vista lifecycle so far have pirates NOT been able to successfully bypass Windows Genuine Advantage" (ZDNet).

Recently, a leaked version of .NET CF "3.7" has surfaced on XDA-Developers. I decided to take a look at it to see what's different. Unfortunately, only the mobile runtime is available, so no easy access to development tools. However, that doesn't stop Red Gate's .NET Reflector from peeking at the insides of a lot of these DLLs.

I was looking through some files in the leaked Windows Mobile 6.5 ROMs floating around the wonderful XDA-Developers site when I stumbled upon what looks like an Outlook Mobile help file. That file mentions Exchange 2010 and some fascinating new features. The two features that are of particular interest are SMS syncing and sending SMS messages from inside Outlook and OWA.

I realize I'm posting this on April 1st, but rest assured, this is not a joke posting, despite the odd title. I just came across a Channel 9 video that discusses a new feature in VB10, implicit line continuation. It's basically a way to avoid having to put an underscore at the end of a line in order to tell the VB compiler that the statement isn't finished yet. While I think that it's an incredibly cool feature, I also think that it should not be implemented.

For some time, I've been considering writing my own UI framework on top of .NET CF as a more attractive, as well as more functional and extensible, alternative to WinForms. WinForms controls in Windows Mobile are limited, especially in the context of .NET CF. The biggest limiting factor concerning their attractiveness is the fact that controls simply do not support transparency natively. Sure, there are ways of doing certain types of transparency when drawing, but there are no good ways of implementing that on top of individual WinForms controls. That is why I have really wanted to write my own framework for this.

Yesterday I saw a tweet from Wil Wheaton about phone scam calls saying that your vehicle warranty is about to expire. I've received that call once on my cellphone. I chose to ignore it because my vehicle warranty has been expired for quite some time, but I'm not sure what I would have done had that not been the case. Now, obviously, I know better, but I had no idea at the time that this scam was going around.

The first (proper) post on my newly redone website needs to be a good one, so here goes. I am announcing a new project of mine called The Vista Syn. It is a Windows service made specifically for Windows Vista (and Windows 7) that makes Synergy work correctly with the new security restrictions imposed on Windows services.

For more information, including a download link, please see The Vista Syn's dedicated page.