Tag Archives: microsoft

It’s time to learn something new

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Humans are constantly learning new things, without that we would probably still live in caves and hunt animals for leather and food. Who knows if we would be even able to use fire properly. Well I don’t want to talk about evolution here so don’t get scared :).

Learning a new stuff is something that, depending on your job, you need to do on a regular basis, or because you want to have a better chances for promotion or simply because you just want to do it. In my case, I simply wanted to do that so I decided to aim for a Microsoft certification. I’s been already more than a year and half since I finished college, so I thought why not to try to learn something new again (and I also needed to think of a quarterly goal for work :)).

As I have some background with web development I chose a 70-480 exam (Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3). To prepare I simply gone through some articles on web and also through this course on MS Virtual Academy: Developing in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Jump Start.

Well long story short. Last week I passed the exam, as I am not allowed to publish details about exam, let me sum it up. If you have several years of experience with developing web applications with JavaScript, CSS and HTML and if you read some materials about news in CSS3 and HTML5 you probably won’t have any trouble passing this exam.

So yay, I’m now certified Microsoft Specialist, but that is probably all there is to it. I learned some new stuff, which I’ll probably won’t be able to use as much as I wanted because in most cases websites need to be compatible with older browsers as well.

It’s time to update your phone

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As I am an owner of an HTC Radar phone I was eagerly waiting for the Windows Phone 7.8 update to roll out. At the start of this weak I was one of the “lucky” ones who opened the Zune and there it was, an information that new update is available.So as eagerly as I was waiting for this update I pressed the Update button and patiently waited for it to end. But it didn’t take long and all my illusions were shattered. During the step 7. of the update process, when the Zune is creating a complete backup of the phone, the process failed and ended with an error number 800700B7. After several more unsuccessful tries I tried to find a bit more information about this error on the Internet. To my surprise the official KB article published by Microsoft mentions a lot of different error codes, but not this one. So after a few more tries with the help of my Google-fu I was able to find a few questions of some people who encountered this same issue. The resolution for them was to perform a hard reset of the phone before the update. Given that there is no way how to backup your Windows Phone it is really a great solution, you will only lose all your messages and application settings.

Quite pissed off I did the hard reset. And what followed next was rather unexpected. With completely wiped out phone, the Zune said that there is no update available, that I have a latest version. At this point I was red with rage. Fortunately the force update steps that can be found on the Internet helped (even thought I had to do them for each of the three available updates).

So my HTC Radar is finally running on Windows Phone 7.8, but to say the truth I am a bit dissapointed by the new tiles. I liked the old layout a bit better then this new one.

And the moral lesson of this story? Don’t expect too much, otherwise you’ll be disappointed or in a worse case pissed off.