I've been meaning to dig in and get to know unit testing for quite some time now. Tonight I dove in and took a look at the Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers. Unit testing is actually quite easy to do. The Getting Started with Team System Testing Tools section in the MSDN library has some nice How-To's on getting started with unit testing using VS'05 Team Edition.

In Mark Shuttleworth's post "#6: Sensory Immersion" he mentions that the open source community needs to take the idea of Second Life and innovate.

An Open Source "Second Life" like virtual world would be very cool. Granted that anyone could take the code and make their own virtual world out of it. But, then what's the point? We would end up with 1,000 virtual worlds.

We would need to create some standardized protocols for this type of virtual system to run on; much the same as how the Web and HTTP run. Then the protocols could unite all the different servers into one huge virtual world. There could essentially be a distributed virtual world and anyone could take the standards and write their own server or client that plugs into it. It would basically work how the Internet/Web itself works except it would be another system on top of that.

This type of system could be the New Web! It would take the web and mold it into an entirely new world. If a client were written for it that implemented Virtual Reality you could actually walk around in this new world and be fully emmerse inside it.

Companies like Verisign could issue certificates that would certify objects and places in the virtual world as being what they appear to be. There could be all kinds of items created/sold inside the virtual world. A whole new economy could emerge within this virtual world.

In order for such a virtual world to succeed; standards would need to be written and there would need to be some governing body (similar to ICANN). The governing body couldn't be a for profit company since all they would see is $$$ instead of Standard Compliance.

There 11 Sidebar Gadgets that come baked into Vista. Some basic ones like a photo  Slide Show, Calendar, Clock, CPU Meter, RSS Feed Headlines, Weather and a couple more. But, what if I want to create one that offers different functionality?

How can I create a custom Sidebar Gadget?

It's actually rather easy to do. As long as you are comfortable with HTML, JavaScript and CSS with splash of XML.

The Gadget Development Overview article in the MSDN library explains how easy it is to create a simple Hello World gadget.

There are also some other resource links listed at the MicrosoftGadgets.com website.

The Vista Sidebar offers some really cool potential for some awesome gadgets to be created.

The Internet Explorer shortcut in the Quick Launch toolbar and in the Start menu of Vista x64 will run the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer by default. Why run the 32-bit version if IE on the 64-bit version of Vista?

There are actually two shortcuts for Internet Explorer in the "All Programs" menu. Why two and what's the difference?

Here's the title of each and the exe's they run:

Internet Explorer
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

Internet Explorer (64-bit)
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

The first one runs IE from the "Program Files (x86)" folder, this is the 32-bit version. The second one is the 64-bit version.

How do I make the Quick Launch shortcut run the 64-bit version of IE?

1. Right-Click the Shortcut
2. Click "Properties"
3. On the Shortcut tab, replace the content of the "Target" textbox with the target from the "Internet Explorer (64-bit)" shortcut in the "All Programs" menu.
4. Happy surfing via IE 64-bit

Are there any gotchas to running the 64-bit version of IE?

Actually there is one that I know of. At the time I'm posting this there is no 64-bit version of Flash Player. So, if you need to view a website that uses Flash, then you'll need to use the 32-bit version IE; at least for now. I'm sure Adobe will release a 64-bit version of Flash Player by the end of January when Vista ships to consumers. But then again, maybe not since Vista x64 runs 32-bit IE by default.

I wonder what other oddities like this are hidden within Vista.

Vista doesn't have any DVD backup programs builtin, but I'm just testing a couple of the popular DVD backup programs and they work perfectly.

The programs I've tested:

• DVD Shrink 3.2
• DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0
• DVDFab Decrypter - Free Edition

I'm actually seeing that the performance of DVD Shrink is a little higher on Vista 64-bit versus the same machine running WinXP 32-bit.

Updated 9/24/2007: I added links above to pages where you can download the above mentioned software.