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Oh God.

As part of its dramatic User-Interface overhaul, Windows Vista added support for high-definition 256×256 pixel application icons. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2008’s lackluster icon editor offers no support for the new standard.

Thankfully, the Visual C++ Team Blog brings word of a free ‘Lite’ edition of the impressive IconWorkshop from Axialis Software. IconWorkshop Lite even integrates directly into Visual Studio 2008.

The software is available here, and the Visual C++ Team Blog announcement is here.

CodeUtopia has some thoughts on Unit Testing Zend Framework applications.

There are some good points made, particularly on the difficulty of realistically testing Controller classes:

Controller testing can be the most difficult part, and this is where you may need to perform some refactoring if your design is not suitable for testing. For example, you may have a lot of logic in your controllers, which might be better off in your models or library code. Testing the whole idea of getting out the correct output or redirects may be difficult.

Zend probably should have had a Unit Testing strategy when developing the Framework initially, but, as always, the community fills in the holes. This also highlights another problem developing PHP applications: there is no standard build process, in which scripts can be unit tested, compiled, optimized, packaged, etc. There are solutions available (Phing is popular, it’s even possible to use Ant) but this is an area where Zend could show real leadership and come up with their own industry-standard, solution (maybe even as part of the Zend Framework, or Zend Studio). I’m not holding my breath, but you never know.

By default, Firefox 3 now blocks Javascript code from hiding the browser navigation bar. The idea behind this is simply to stop malicious popups from emulating a native OS window.

But, for advances users well aware of what constitutes a malicious popup and what it looks like, the ever-present navigation bar can be distracting. Fortunately, you can disabled it by altering a setting in about:config.

1. Type about:config into the navigation bar and press Enter (ignore the warning).
2. Type dom.disable_window_open_feature.location into the filter textbox. A single entry should remain.
3. Change the value field to false.

You can now close the about:config window; popups can now hide the navigation bar like in previous versions of Firefox. To restore the default setting, simply change the value back to true.