This blog post shall serve as my semi-official request to receive a Windows Phone 7 development device from Microsoft. So, why should I receive one of these devices? The reasons are quite simple.
Recently, the Diaspora project has been making waves on the Internet. Personally, I'm glad someone is taking privacy seriously for a change, but that's not what this post is about. One thing about the project that caught my attention is that their Kickstarter page says that they promise to release the source code under "aGPL", also known as Affero GPL.
I think I can safely say that, to date, I've not really released anything that I could consider popular. Things like The Vista Syn are useful tools for a very limited audience. That's exactly what I expected when I released ArkSwitch, a finger-friendly Windows Mobile 6.5.1+ task manager. After all - it's a task manager, which there are plenty of out there; for an unreleased version of WinMo; and it doesn't even have the coolest features of other task managers, like taking over the X button.
Well, that's not entirely how it happened.
By the time this blog entry is published, I will have submitted my new Silverlight app to the MIX 10K Challenge. Pentatonality, as I have named it, is a Silverlight 3-based application that provides a fun way to make music - simply by clicking or dragging boxes to turn them on and off. This is made possible through the use of a pentatonic scale, so that virtually any combination of notes will "sound good."
EDIT: I've linked to a local copy of the app at the end of the post.
EDIT 2: The entry has been posted to the MIX site: please vote for it!
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?
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 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.
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.
Since the release of Windows Vista, I've read quite a few complaints about services being unable to interact with the user's desktop. I've also read various posts and articles explaining why that is the case, which make sense to me in general. However, there are use cases in which services need to interact with users in some fashion. The one I'm concentrating on is remote control. Synergy, a "software KVM", as some have described it, always needs access to the current desktop in the current window station in the current session because it needs to send keyboard and mouse input to it. From what I can tell, it has no problems switching between multiple desktops inside a single window station. However, it appears to be unaware of multiple sessions. That is what causes it to fail when installed as a Windows service and makes it impossible to log in to Synergy client machines running Vista and Windows 7.
