I spent some time this past weekend playing with Windows Vista. By playing, I mean I tried to install it on a couple machines. The first lucky recipient was my MacBook Pro. I attempted to install it as both a clean install and as Windows XP upgrade in Parallels (Build 1884 RC). No dice - I got a blue screen of death with both installs. It didn't even make it to the "copy files" phase. Next, I tried it on my Windows box. Rather than blow away Windows Media Center (the kids would kill me), I installed it in VMWare Server. Amazingly enough, it worked without any issues. While both VMWare and Parallels label their Vista support as "experimental", it seems that VMWare is doing a much better job. I wonder when VMWare is going to release their VMWare Server for the Mac?
After installing it, I discovered that Windows Media Center is included in Vista, so I'm guessing I could easily upgrade Windows Media Center w/o losing any functionality. I played around with the OS a bit and after about 10 minutes decided I liked the look of XP better and the look of OS X way better. It seemed very sluggish as well, but I'll attribute that to the 768 MB of RAM I gave it in VMWare. Will I upgrade? Probably, but at this point, I don't see a whole lot to get excited about (at least from an end-user perspective).
Life is pretty good today. I'm currently working outside - in a courtyard area near the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. There's 4 restaurants in the courtyard, all with outside seating. It's 72°F and beautiful. I plan to work for a few hours, then hop on the 5:00 train to NYC.
The reason I'm writing this post is to point out a few useful tidbits I've picked up today. First of all, Andrew Glover has written a developerWorks article on Cargo titled In pursuit of code quality: Repeatable system tests. In this article, he shows how to use jWebUnit as well as DbUnit. While the article uses Ant, Andrew mentions that Cargo also works with Maven (and has a Java API too).
Equinox uses jWebUnit, Maven and Cargo, but it doesn't currently support running Cargo from Maven. The major reason for this is I tried to automate running jWebUnit tests from the antrun-plugin and couldn't get it to work (I only tried for 10 minutes). Does anyone have any insight for including jWebUnit tests alongside your regular tests, excluding them from Maven's "test" phase, and running them in the "integration-test" phase?
The good news is AppFuse 2.0 uses Maven as well, and we have Cargo + Canoo WebTest working just fine. BTW, did you know that Mergere’s Maestro (a free product) includes Equinox? If you're looking to learn Continuum and you're familiar with Equinox, downloading Maestro is probably a good start.
Speaking of web testing, I've been playing with Selenium lately. I was able to easily integrate it into Thomas and I's Spring 2.0 Kickstart application thanks to these Maven and Selenium integration instructions. The only issues I've run into so far are specifying an initial URL that works in Selenium core as well as Selenium IDE and integrating Selenium with CruiseControl. If you're interested in learning more about Selenium checkout Catching up with Selenium on InfoQ.
Last, but certainly not least, Struts 2.0 was released today. I've already integrated this into the Struts version of AppFuse 2.0. If you like living on the bleeding, you could dig in and try it out today. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to put a whole lot of documentation together yet. I hope to install Confluence on appfuse.org sometime this week to start documenting how bad-ass AppFuse 2.0 will be 
.
Speaking of 2.0 releases, wasn't Spring 2.0 Final supposed to be released yesterday?
I spent some time this past weekend playing with Windows Vista. By playing, I mean I tried to install it on a couple machines. The first lucky recipient was my MacBook Pro. I attempted to install it as both a clean install and as Windows XP upgrade in Parallels (Build 1884 RC). No dice - I got a blue screen of death with both installs. It didn't even make it to the "copy files" phase. Next, I tried it on my Windows box. Rather than blow away Windows Media Center (the kids would kill me), I installed it in VMWare Server. Amazingly enough, it worked without any issues. While both VMWare and Parallels label their Vista support as "experimental", it seems that VMWare is doing a much better job. I wonder when VMWare is going to release their VMWare Server for the Mac?