Banana Free kick

Here's the scientific explanation of this legendary kick.

http://tinyurl.com/26ss5kt

ToList() function not appearing in intellisense

This is more of a reminder to myself than a well written blog. On a few occassions it took me quite a while to figure out why ToList() function was not available to the argument returned back after a WCF service had completed. On one occassion it was literally mind boggling. The reason turned out to be was quite simple : I had missed including a using statement for assembly System.Linq. Now that it has occurred again i am blogging to primarily benefit myself and if somebody else benefits then I'd be more than happy.

Cheers

Chrome and Firefox: making mouse wheel working with Silverlight map control

The other day I stumbled upon a situation which I though was a limitation with Silverlight Bing Map Control. The mouse wheel wasn't working with zooming while using either of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browsers. I posted it at MSDN forums and was promptly fed back by an expert. Here is the link for whole thread :
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vemapcontroldev/thread/1e61eb01-984b-42e4-a36f-4d2d8e05a1cd
The key setting to make in host page(hosting silverlight content) is : Windowless="false".
Have fun!!

Chotaaay!

It is about a telecom company advertisement in which a "chota" is made to run to get to the client end. Not many things wrong with it but the part which "pinches" me is the way little boy is made to run and looks completely spent while he reaches the client who tells him about some convenient mobile service, acquiring which , his "ustaad" won't have to send him over and over again. The picture of running-low-on-oxygen boy panting hard ,make me realise hardships of hundereds of thousands of danty hands working in our workshops and may be bearing hardships of far greater proportions everyday. The boy's face in said advertisement gives me more concern than any amusement. Your thoughts are welcome.

Silverlight

So if you have not been living in a cave for some time you must have heard about Silverlight. I have been working with it for some time now and would like to give you my two cents about it. I would call it an initiative by Microsoft to tap into the market for which Adobe Flash has been dominating for almost a decade now. That seems to be the main motive behind Silverlight's launch however there is more to it. Silverlight is a browser plugin which makes it a client end technology. Its a scaled down version of .NET Framework (a humble 4 MB download) with support for programming languages such as C# and VB (traditionally its been all Javascript). Within the plugin it gives the feel of a desktop application however security bar remains the same as it is there for any web application. Now a million dollar question . Would Silverlight be able to replace Adobe Flash or get a big chunk out of AJAX market? I think for now people would go for a hybrid ( pages hosting both AJAX and Silverlight content ) approach and who knows in future it might be the next heartbeat of web.

ciao!

Fuel shortage

Last night I was caught in a routine traffic 'rut' , you know that snail paced traffic moving gingerly? That is something part of our daily life now. But my alarm bells started ringing when I noticed my gas indicator dropping to last point. There are not many worse things you can imagine than being caught in the middle of a jam packed road without any gas! The nearest petrol pump I knew was not too far away so i was kind of relieved, but what is this? As I reached one of the gas stations it was closed with oil drums blocking the entrance. Second one had one of those long queues of cars resembling deewar e cheen, motorcycles surrounded petrol terminals like honey bees. "What to do", I murmured. I was running out of gas and standing in one of the queues would mean that I'd run out of gas by the time I get my turn. After a bit of mental tussle I decided to stop at one of the stations which had comparatively shorter queues and finally after idling for about half an hour I managed to get my share of gas which turned out to be only 3 points. I was told janab gas ka pressure he itna hay , yeah may be all the pressure is directed towards common man in terms of load shedding,fuel shortage,inflation and what not? But then as they say 'Something is better than nothing'. Life goes on.

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