So that your threads do not tangle..

I had never thought an application could crash of an unsafely handled label. But this did happen with me once when this exception popped up out of nowhere and said: InvalidOperationException : Control label1 accessed from a thread other than the thread it was created on. As .Net developers, we usually assume that all such stuff is being taken care of by the framework or the visual studio. Hence this was something new for me. As I figured out, this is a compile time exception which occurs to warn the developer of a situation when more than one thread would try to access the same control and hence get locked. This exception usually occurs during compile time and reliably during debugging and sometimes during run-time.

Rebuild Master

This happens a lot of times that you install your Sql Server with a particular collation and find that the database you need to have on the server requires a different collation. At first this seems to be pretty simple. I thought I would just go to the Server properties and change it. I made a confident move for it only to find that the collation cannot be edited from the properties. I browsed through a few online forums which suggested re-installing the Sql Server. I was not willing to give re-installation a try (Installing the MS Sql Server really makes you develop ardent love for cloud services). So I asked a few peers around and then eventually the IT guys and all of them suggested a re-installation. Re-installing the Sql Server is a cumbersome task. Also the collation property box (though inactive) would not let me think that there was not a simpler way to do it. After a little searching I finally found a simpler way.

Of Zombies and Unicorns..

“Honest Differences are often a healthy sign of progress.” – M K Gandhi

In the past 2 weeks we saw a few resolute people standing against the Indian government to bring about a system in place which is expected to provide a fix for corruption in India. This small group of people who call themselves the Civil Society regarded the LokPal bill proposed by the parliament incapable of solving the corruption problem in India. They suggested a Jan-LokPal bill of their own which was proposed to be much more effective. The difference in opinions did not boil down to an open discussion and rather took form of a protest movement which attracted eyes from across the globe as well as the support of millions of Indians. The desperate need of this country to lighten itself from prevailing corruption requires no explanation. This post comments on the effectiveness of the bill and the response of the people associated with it.

Thou shalt be compliant !

The bullish surges and the nose dives, the bursting bubbles and the depression fears……if the system could contain itself with some grace at all, there would have been no policing. Every time we see the market crash, be it the black Friday , the great depression or the 2008 Credit Crunch, it brings out the need to put in place some sort of discipline in the market.

MAX Dope

Have you ever felt the frustration of waiting for your data to be fetched while your Sql query is taking millions of years to get executed? Sometimes it goes fast when the server is moderately loaded, but rush hour time and yo ! you are staring at the thing looking as dumb as a person staring at the hot toaster. So it is the mark of an educated mind to strive and make your queries as efficient as possible. Here I wish to mention one way you can make your queries get executed faster.

The Wishing Well

"How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd." ~ Alexander Pope

Wishes are terrible things! They can make you create wonderful things which might change the world around you, they can make you strive and take your abilities to their limits, they can push you out of your bed early each day. At the same time, they can make you jealous of others, corrupt your mind and make you run after mirages you never can get close to.

The BIG quake : How far has the shockwave gone

8.9 on the richter scale, that is the biggest I’ve ever heard in my life. The ground shaking tremors followed by 7m high Tsunami waves and then blasts in the nuclear plant and nuclear radiation alerts, life couldn’t be worse for the Japanese. They say, ‘the Japanese are always waiting for the big one’. It is not a coincidence that Tsunami happens to be a Japanese word. But for a quake this big, even the expecting and suspecting couldn’t be prepared.

Confessions of an Introvert

Introverts and Extroverts are two categories people can be classified into, and these terms are too common for their meaning to be discussed here. In case you have a doubt, you know what to do. For the rest of this article, I’ll be calling them I’s and E’s in quotes just for the sake of less redundancy.

Making your first Deep Zoom App

Deep Zoom is a manifestation of microsoft's open source technology for use in image viewing applications. This concept has revolutionized high resolution image viewing, specially on the internet where the loading time and size are important concerns. The silverlight deep zoom app provides a brilliant solution for this need, and yet it is extremely simple to create. Not only is it possible to view a lot of images on a single canvas, they can also be browsed and zoomed in / out in a seem-less manner.

Have you tasted the SIP yet ?

“Somebody reminded me the other night that I once said "greed is good." I swear I don't remember it but it sounds like something I would say in the eighties.” ~ Gordon Gekko, Money Never Sleeps

Investments today are all about growing your money steadily without giving bad luck a chance. High risk ventures and quick fortune schemes are forgotten tales, the present day investments are backed by concrete risk management and intensive market study. The markets have learnt a lot from the mistakes in the past and with every fall they come back stronger. After all, nobody wants to see another black Monday, nobody wants to be another Harshad Mehta.

Fire in the Hole

There was an era when the Islamic nations were so much synchronized in their ideologies that we gave them the ‘Islamic nations’ tag. There was a time, when the rulers of the Islamic world lived as absolute monarchs ruling their land for decades smoothly. People say that the time moves slowly in the Middle East, that Mubarak has ruled Egypt for 30 years, that Saddam had ruled Iraq for 24 years and that nothing has changed in Yemen since the times of Sindbad. But well, time is not a static phenomenon.

XLinq

Aloha ! So I’m back, this time to discuss how to query an xml document using LINQ, as I promised.