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Apparently this crazyness started few days ago, and I took this quiz also.
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aka Audiovox SMT 5600, aka i-mate SP3, aka Qtek 8010, aka whatever his name is. Actualy the handset is made by HTC and was called by its parents Smartphone ST20A (at least the manual says so).
Well, it was quite an adventure to buy this handset from Orange Romania. Their site listed the phone at a price tag of 289 USD + VAT, with or without subscription, or “Thank you“ fidelity program. In this case I wanted to but the phone without any “strings” attached, and went to their store. At the store, one employee told me that they cannot sell me the phone without “strings” because they don't sell phones actually. “Wow, but your site says other things”. We are sorry but we can't sell you the phone unless you buy a new subscription or sign for another year your current subscription. I knew someone that actually bought the phone without any kind of problem, so I called Customer Care. Surprise... we cannot sell the phone. After a few minutes with their Customer Care, I hanged up and tried to find some dealer that would sell me the damn phone. In another few minutes Customer Care called me back and told me that now they can sell me the phone, but only if I buy a prepay card, and the price is not 289 USD + VAT but 296 USD + VAT. Well, 7 USD difference + 6 USD for the prepay card, now we're talking. SELL ME THE DAMN PHONE. 1 Hour later I had the phone in my hand. I waited a SPV for 2 years I think, but Orange RO decided to postpone the E100 handset, than the E200 handset and now the finally awaited C500 was launched. Well, I'm very happy...
I have a phone with Windows Mobile 2003 SE, and now I am ready to develop for this phone. I want to build application to fit me, and this first in the list is a RSS reader.
I've already found a bug. I've installed SmartExplorer and SP Task Manager, and I'm not sure if this is the cause but if I expand the WINDOWS folder in SmartExplorer soon I have a resource leakage. Icons won't be painted correctly, and menu isn't always displayed, or checkboxes aren't shown, so you don't know if the option is checked or no. I'll try to reproduce again this incovenient.
Another inconvenient that I found is that you cannot associate ringtones to contacts stored on SIM, and also you cannot group contacts and set ringtone to a specific group and not directly to contacts. Hey, even my old Sagem My-X5 has this feature. Microsoft are you sleeping?
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Yesterday I've received my ordered DVD with goodies from Microsoft's partners that are in the Visual Studio Industry Partner Program. It can be ordered from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/extend/partnerdvd/ and contains 67 products and trials, from all categories such as: Architecture & Design, Cross Lifecycle & Support Tools, Deployment, and so on. A interesting note is that the estimated arrival time printed on the package is 2nd December 2004, and I've received it 2 weeks earlier. Wow, very good response time.
With this ocasion I found out a product evaluated long time ago, named StarTeam now branded as Borland StarTeam. A few years ago, when I evaluated it, the company was named StarBase, and it seems that Borland bought it. It is mainly a change and configuration management system that can be used to replace VSS and improve the development process by providing traceability (another key requirement for MSF) of the business requirements into the actual output. At the time of the evaluation (back to 1999 - 2000) I was quite impressed by the capability of StarTeam: it was cross-platform, with both GUI native Windows application, and a command line either native and java based application, it provided a SDK in order to access the full capabilities and automate them.
There are a lot of other goodies included on this DVD, so I have to find some time in order to fill the bag.
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I'm not sure I've said here, but I am from Romania. Well, yesterday I've received an email from Brainbench, with a special offer for Romanians: 85% discount, bringing the subscription to a merely 30 USD/year. Also they were saying that Romania is on the 8th place as performance in the Brainbench charts. The offer is present mainly because the Romanian people cannot afford to spend 200 USD/year, for many people, especially junior ones, this can mean the salary for a full month.
Well this is a great honour for me to say that I'm from Romania, we are on the 8th place. A great performance for us.
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My blog was quite inactive for a while, and the primary reason is the fact that I find very little free time. Usually, the finish of the year is quite crowded by the work related tasks that are waiting to be finished.
Last week I attended a Microsoft Course, to be more specific “1846A - Microsoft Solutions Framework Essentials”. It was a great offer from Microsoft Romania, offer presented at MSDN Briefing this fall: the only two certified trainers in MSF are working for Microsoft, and they wanted to promote MSF in Romania, and the course was FREE. Yes, you've read correctly, three full days, for FREE. The typical fee for a course like this I've heard that is around 400-500 USD.
This course can be used in order to achieve the 70-301 exam, a brand new exam, that is for MSF 3.0, and replaces 70-300 exam.
The course was presented in the Microsoft Romania meeting room, in Bucharest. With this ocasion we could see (we were around 25 people) how is Microsoft Romania from inside. Just like you've heard: there are free beverages, but I couldn't find Coca Cola. Only Pepsi was present in the refrigerator. Maybe people at Microsoft Romania don't like Coca Cola, who knows.
Well after attending this course many things were clarified to me. The most important thing: you cannot have great products if the whole team doesn't agree on all the aspects. Actually this is the first rule of MSF: all team members (I'm talking about MSF team here) are equally important, and they must agree. If they don't agree, the project is a “No-go” without any doubt.
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I found today an older post that links to an interesting book, named “.NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Volume 1: Base Class Library and Extended Numerics Library”, and I discovered an interesting discussion: should we derive our custom exceptions from Exception or from ApplicationException. To be honest, I didn't paid attention to ApplicationException when I browsed the documentation, and I went straight, and derived from Exception. Apparently it was a good choice.
Just my 2 cents.
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Yag has compiled a list of products created by Microsoft that are developed either entirely, or just some features, with .NET code. As we can see the list contains some interesting products like UDDI server or Sharepoint Portal Server (from Windows 2003), and most important the list is increasing. At a MSDN conference here in Romania, in regards with this subject, it was said that the next version in Office will have more modules developed using .NET (this should mean no more PIAs?).
The conclusion is: Winforms is gaining momentum, which is a very good thing.
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Maybe only if you are living in a isolated island you didn't heard the great news: we will have Edit & Continue in C# for Whidbey (aka Visual Studio 2005). You can read the announcement here. So, now all the major development languages (sorry J# guys) will experience the Edit & Continue feature. A great productivity enhancement.
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Since webmatrixhosting decided to remove accounts after 30 days of trial, I had to find a new home for my site, including my personal blog. I found Webhost4life, which have ASP.NET hosting at resonable price, with 300 MB of storage, SQL Server 2000 database, email and so on. For the moment the main site is not online, but two subdomains: blogs.mconstantin.eu.org and gallery.mconstantin.eu.org. Soon, I'll update and the main site.
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I've just finished installing nGallery. In case you didn't know nGallery is a FREE and OPEN SOURCE ASP.NET Image Gallery written in C#. Getting it to work along with .Text was a little bit tricky but it worked after all. So if you want to see some of my pictures: http://gallery.mconstantin.eu.org/
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The release for UAT from previous Monday had around 80 bugs, with almost 40 marked for future release (almost all of the 40 bugs are feature requests, more or less). Pretty much ok, but this area still needs improving.
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After 14 days of free Brainbench, the results are:
- Certfied as .NET programmer (this was my main target)
- 16 tests completed, 6 @ Master level
- 3 more exams required to be certified as “Systems architect“: Network Monitoring, Software Business Analysis, and one elective (from 3 possible options)
- 1 more exam required for “Linux System Administrator“
In conclusion, I'm satisfied with the results.
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As you already should know, between 1st and 14th of July 2004 all tests of Brainbench are FREE!
I tried the plan feature of the Brainbench and I must say that is very cool. So far I selected four job roles: .NET Programmer, Systems Architech, Network Administrator and Linux System Administrator. My main target is to finish “.NET Programmer” Role, others if it is possible. I graduated all electives, and I have 5 more required: “Business Communication“, “Listening skills“, “Programmer analyst aptitude“, “Programming concepts“ and “Written English“.
I've got 4.53 at ASP.NET and 4.6 at ADO.NET. For the others I'm not so proud, but still... I'm not perfect.
I won't update the post, so in order to see my latest achievments and if I got the .NET Programmer role after all, check at http://www.brainbench.com/xml/bb/transcript/public/viewtranscript.xml?pid=191487
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Monday is the day of the RELEASE. Monday is the day set for the start of the UAT (User acceptance test). The project where I wrote code, and helped for the specs, and made the design of the security subsystem and ... a lot else is approaching very fast to be released for UAT. Today when I left there were 104 bugs with status open, or fixed not assigned. This is the metric I'm using to find the status of the project. My target is zero bugs opened, but since there are a few with disposition “for next release”, I suppose that this isn't possible. But Saturday and Sunday are long days... let's hope for the best.
Me going to sleep, tomorrow will start early. Wish me luck!
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Un post foarte interesant al lui Ovidiu Platon despre viata la Politehnica.
http://weblogs.studentclub.ro/ovidiupl/articles/380.aspx
Comentariile sunt cel putin la fel de “delicioase” cat articolul. Avand in vedere ca sunt absolvent de Politehnica nu pot decat sa-i dau dreptate, si sa sper ca poate candva se va schimba ceva.
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