That rather speaks for itself.  Thanks to cnet.com and theunderstatement.com

Check out these features:

• No images, no external CSS
• No dependencies (jQuery is supported, but not required)
• Highly configurable
• Resolution independent
• Uses VML as fallback in old IEs
• Uses @keyframe animations, falling back to setTimeout()
• Works in all major browsers, including IE6
• MIT License

Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the web’s history. But the web has come a long way since then with HTML5. Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI.

No Flash then.

Firmware update 1.06.15 was released around the time I wrote the post. I checked on the update list; no thumbnail issue was mentioned. Despite there being no mention of it, I was still hopeful of a fix.

Network share thumbnails are still broken in the latest firmware update.

I was very impressed with the playback quality from a USB-attached Samsung 1.5 external drive, and life was good. I improved the experience by trawling the internet for suitable cover art to accompany the media files. All I had to do was find a JPG image, ensure it was less than 70k in size, name it the same as the media file, and hey presto, it would be shown in the UI. This made it a lot easier for my four year old son to identify the film he’d like to watch. What’s more, I could even organise TV episodes into folders, and assign an image to that folder. UI heaven.

So, fast forward about a year to the present day. My collection of media files had swollen to many gigabytes, and despite the reliability of hard drives, I had a niggling feeling that if the drive failed, I’d be left high and dry. All those hours spent converting the DVDs and finding those JPGs would have been wasted.  I needed a NAS.

After another cycle of reading reviews, I plumped for the QNAP TS-210, which offered RAID 1 redundancy. Setup was simplicity itself, and after installing two 2TB drives, I had peace of mind and a little bit of extra storage. I disconnected the external Samsung drive from my WD TV Live HD and plugged it into one of the two USB ports on the back of the NAS. I fired off a copy from external drive to NAS and headed to bed.

By morning, all the data had been copied, and I pointed my media player at the network share I had configured on the NAS using the ‘network share’ option on the media player. After a couple of permissions issues that I quickly resolved, I then had a ‘wtf?’ moment. The JPGs that were previously assigned to the movie files were suddenly being shown twice – once as the image file, and once against the movie file. So, every image was shown twice. Which is quite an issue when you have lots of movie files.

I was up-to-date with the media player’s firmware, and since I assumed that lots of people were using a network share and NAS, I thought it must have been something I needed to do to resolve the issue. After all, it was quite a sloppy UI issue, and surely, after all this time, it wasn’t actually a software bug was it? Surely not. Surely Western Digital were aware of it, and had a workaround.

Straight to google then, and the realisation that it is a bug after all.

Browsing video in network shares also shows the jpeg images separately (unlike locally attached drives) making them practically useless.  Make the network shares video browsing work exactly the same as local drives (namely: hide the thumbnail jpegs except as standins for the videos)

A response from a Western Digital employee:

Status changed to: In Review

We’ll see what we can do about this. Because a Network Share drive is not the same as a USB storage, the support is a bit difficult as there are more uncertainties.

The date of the first post was 20 March 2010. That’s 17 months. Firmware updates over the air (or wire) are a great way to fix bugs and to tweak and improve the feature set of an existing device. Why oh why this hasn’t been fixed yet is anybody’s guess.

I had no idea I’d face this issue – I just thought it was a given that the device would work as was with the device physically connected. Having got my NAS configured and media copied, it was a tremendous disappointment (to say the least) that the media player let me down, having performed so well up to then. What is even more disgruntling, however, is the lack of action from Western Digital in the matter.

This comment sums up my feelings rather well:

There really is no good reason imo that this hasn’t been fixed yet, and if it’s the programmers that are telling you that it’s “hard” to fix then you just need to replace them with people who CAN get the job done.  What’s worse is that the thumbnail system has actually degraded and isn’t even as “stable” (if you could ever call it stable) as when I got it.  Now, I (along with many others) who have more than 100 folder.jpg files (at least I’ve been told that that’s the “cause”) can’t even cache all of our thumbnails without the unit freezing and requiring a hard reset.  This is only as of the latest firmware, 1.02.21, but that firmware is now 2 months old and they haven’t done anything to fix what they broke.  Please WD, listen to us, and fix this stuff.

So – Western Digital, please fix this issue. My opinion of this little player has gone downhill.

I feel that private methods should be tested, because a core idea of unit testing is to test small units of functional code, which by definition, includes private methods.

Without question, private methods are trickier to unit test than public methods; at first glance, it isn’t obvious at all. Unit testing code is client code after all, and by definition, private methods aren’t visible. However, there are ways, and I present three of them here.

1. Roll your own private method call using reflection
2. Use the .NET InternalsVisibleTo attribute
3. Use the test team API’s PrivateObject class