Yeah, looks like i was on a sabbatical this long... anyway, looks like time is right to be back to be able to bug you folks. will try to keep pure tech stuff out of the way and if at all something does appear, il make sure it has got something to do with a humor or an interesting narration whatever. Cia soon.

Aw, the 18th of July 08 was an unforgettable day. So it was a friday evening around 5pm i was sitting in a Bus, heading towards Seattle from Bluemond. Things were pretty usual on that friday till i noticed something absurd, something really funny. We were travelling over a ramp that would help us enter WA-520 and i could clearly see that Bluemond police have cordoned off WA-520 and the road was blocked to public transit. Hmm, something goin on.

We cruised along (dont ask me how, shall get to it soon) and within minutes merged onto I-5 and holy lord! I-5 suffered a similar fate. Cmon, you gotta be kiddin me, whoz blockin an Interstate highway? Only difference was it was the Seattle police this time. And i just noticed an array of police officers whizz alongside our bus. Every exit, ramp, entry, in/out of I-5 was blocked.

Our driver turned on the local radio, i heard it say, "For some reason, I-5 seems to be gridlocked". One of my friends pulled out his y-phone and checked the traffic. Trust me, what we saw was funny, very funny. The traffic before us was fully green and behind us was all red ;) Well, it was like this, since we, Xsft's interns had to goto seattle from bluemond for a party, the company had had the entire route blocked to public transit but open only to us. Waaw, its so evil but without a doubt good to be on the other side of a road block, atleast for once :)

YaaaaY! So, what the heck am i screaming about :)
Alright non-technical folks, am gonna disappoint you, this is purely a tech post.

So, there is this spec for partial methods in C# :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wa80x488.aspx

And the very last line says:
You cannot make a delegate to a partial method.

Why:
Am not pretty sure of the reason behind this design decision, but one of my friend points out that the reason could be,

say you have a partial method declaration like partial void foo();
and a partial method implementation like
partial void foo()
{

}

Lets say now that you make a delegate to Foo, and after sometime, you may choose to remove the implementation from the code. So partial methods allow the impl to be removed and declaration to still be there. But still you'll have your delegate pointing to foo and it will result in a build failure for the project and may be they preferred not to encourage such confusions?

Alright, whats the big deal about it?
Well, have u tried creating a delegate to a partial method ever?
Darn it, it works! I mean the C#3.0 compiler shipped with Visual Studio 2008, accepts a delegate to a partial method.

Well its not a tricky bug or a gotcha in the C# compiler that i stumbled upon, but a mere non-adherence to the compiler spec(the ultimate authority).

I even thought it could be a documentation defect but turns out that its not so. Right now, the C# team is investigating this.

Anyway, finding a bug in the shipped C# compiler is something that i could scream about... so, YaaaaY !

Helloooo !
Been a long time since i roughed up the space here... so what was i upto?
Well, been quite busy - going places around WA and OR.
Covered Snoqualmie falls, Mount si, Mt St. Helen (Active Volcano) in Washington and the International Rose Garden, Mt Hood, Horse tail falls, Multnomah falls in Oregon.
Shall post the pics on picasa soon, stay tuned :)

My first day at Redmond started off quite remarkably. It was exactly lunch time when i realized that i had no one to lunch with! I was standing alone, lost in the overwhelming crowd of Bldg #41's cafeteria. I turn left right but no dice. Alright, so be it, lets grab a bite and get back to work, i thought. I quickly parsed through the array of stalls - mexican, chinese, lebanese but they all had one common defect. Absolutely no veg stuff at all. It can't be that bad., i scanned one more time and in some unnoticeable nook i found veggie pizzas. Bingo! thats it. Thats all i could ask for. Somehow lunch for day #1 had been taken care of!

The Second day was a bit better in the sense i already knew where to get what i can consume. I went right up there and picked up the pizzas. Thankfully, a different topping today but if it wasn't so i wouldn't have complained either. Sigh! Lunch alone. Again! When i was almost done, i met some guy who was searching for company. I nodded him to join me and we spoke over lunch or whatever was left of it.

The third day was more better. My mentor and another team member took me for lunch. I should say they were pretty cool, discussing day to day activities than arguing over tech stuff. We were discussing China's quake, Jaipur blasts and Myanmar floods and fund raising ideas to counterbalance the miseries of the world.

The fourth day saw some progress as i discovered an Indian cuisine at Bldg #43's cafe but still it was a 'lunch alone' for me.

A week folds over, without creating a proper lunch pattern for me. Very well, so be it, i was saying to myself. A dozen days later, today, there is Jan, Har, Div and San with me. We lunch (not just that, we do a bunch of more activities) together these days! My 10 min lunch break unrolled itself to a full blown 60 min break. We bring food from home, buy food from the cafe and swipe a lot of food from the rest of the gang. A proper lunch these days consists of good swipes from atleast 5 different plates ;-) The food strewn, sauce smeared table reminds me of my Undergrad days. 3 years hence those good old days, to me, it appears that the best things in life haven't changed a bit. Perhaps life's code is recursive too!

It was 8 am, i was in my office already. Had some good amount of work to finish up and i was early on that day, skipped breakfast(whats that?) as usual. I tried to get down to work but the box of corn flakes in my office draw was tempting (neram da). Aalright, it wont take more than a minute. I withdrew a lil bowl, put in some crispy flakes, crunchy oats, strawberries (i stock a lot in my office draw), off to the cafeteria - some sugar n milk and in goes the bowl to the microwave. Back to my seat, what more to garnish with? A touch of honey and breakfast is ready! It was simply a wow! For a moment, I felt like i've never had better stuff before. At the very instant, dosais (my staple breakfast back home) flash before me and the song vaseegara was fading away in the background. Snap!! I could only manage to let out a sad smile. I force myself back to work to put up with another day but not before inking this.