I'm just back from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, where the star of the show was the latest update to the Silverlight browser plug-in that lets you run .NET applications cross-platform and within the browser. The pace of development is remarkable. It is only 9 months ago that we were first shown the beta of Silverlight 3, at the Mix conference in March. Silverlight 3 was fully released in July; and now we have version 4.0 beta, with release promised for the first half of 2010.

In my previous post I talked about the impact of jQuery Selectors on a page that I analyzed. The page took 4.8 seconds in the onLoad event handler. 2 seconds were mainly caused by the selectors as described in the blog. The other 2.8 seconds were caused by a dynamic JavaScript menu – in that particular case it was the superfish jQuery plugin. A closer analysis showed why it takes so long and this also got me to do some research on these menus. Kudos to Joel Birch for his excellent plugin – easy to integrate – and – if properly used – its fast enough

This is a detailed post explaining the reasons high groth of Orkut in India and why Facebook has now started gaining share in India. A must read for any one remotely interest in social networking.

jQuery is not just about Menus and Animation Effects. With jQuery you can also create attractive text effects and play with the text to communicate well with the users. With this collection, you can create text gradients, text fly effects, text glow and much more.