Wavyx

Here is a video I really like. You can see air traffic around the globe and in some way, this feels really organic to me.

Planes are like ants trying to find food and auto-organizing themselves (not necessarily with the shortest path). This recall me of the Ant colony optimization for solving TSP problem.

Here are some resources for the ACO optimization for TSP problems: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3689188/Ant-Colony-TSP-Optimization, http://www.ugosweb.com/Documents/jacs.aspx or http://www.idsia.ch/~luca/acs-bio97.pdf.

Last friday, I was looking for an easy way to generate small website screenshots or webshot. I only had 3000 thousands webshots to generate (which is pretty low compared to web2.0 news sites).

Moreover, this is a one shot generation so any “quick and dirty” solution would have satisfied me Here are the possible solutions I found:

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SQLite is a well known alternative for developers wishing to provide a light database embedded with the application. Moreover SQLite is in the public domain and thus allows many developpers to rely on this SQL database engine.

For .Net developpers who needs a local databse, you can use SQLite in application developped in C# or VB.net by using one of the following wrappers:

1. System.Data.SQLite is the original SQLite database engine. It is a complete ADO.NET 2.0 provider and can be used as full replacement for the original sqlite3.dll. It has no linker dependency on the .NET runtime so it can be distributed independently of .NET.
2. Finisar.SQLite was the original ADO.NET Data Provider for accessing SQLite-Databases using the .NET-Framework. It is no longer under active development and has been replaced by System.Data.SQLite.
3. SQLite.NET wrapper  is a simple wrapper composed by a couple of classes in C# to allow access to SQLite databases. This is not an ADO.NET provider, but instead it provides a simple set of methods to access and retrieve data in a result set class.

I recommend this 2 quick tutorials to get started with SQLite in a .Net environment: SQLite on .NET – Get up and running in 3 minutes and Using sqlite with .NET.

Last but not least, if you need some visual database manager (GUI), you can try SQLite2008 Manager, SQLite Administrator or SQLiteTool. See also SQLite Trac for a more comprehensive list or this link.

When you use .Net, you sometimes need some old win32 api’s. Even if a managed environment is really appreciable and confortable, there are some part of windows you can’t access from C# or VB .net code. Then you often have no other choice than rely on old windows system calls.

This generally implies a lot of marshalling and interop to wrap unmanaged windows functions into nice managed .Net namespaces. And this is also true for mobile developpers interacting with Windows CE dll, see Interop for .Net Compact Framework.

I just discovered that  a couple of Win32 functionnalities are already bundled in the Microsoft.Win32 namespace of the .Net framework.

Another great resource for COM interop is the P/Invoke wiki !

And for those who are (still) more familiar with the old school windows functions, you can refer to this map to find your way in the .Net environment.

Among the devoxx 2008 university slides, you can find a Groovy/Grails presentation. This document contains interesting references:

• Griffon is a Grails like application framework for developing desktop applications in Groovy. You can begin with the quick start guide.
  
• Gradle is a build system like Ant, Maven or Ivy but trying to get the best from all. It supports multi-project build and  dependency management. And you still can use you old Ant tasks.
• Easyb is Behavior Driven Development framework (BDD). It uses a specification based Domain Specific Language (DSL).  The main idea is to keep really close to the business needs all along the development process. With this tool you’ll have a readable documentation AND a unit-testing all-in-one. You may start by reading first this tutorial.
• Compass is an open source project built on top of Lucene, to simplify the integration of search capabilities in your java applications .

And of course you can still refer to the Groovy and Grails websites.

I’m looking for a way to insert an auto-update functionnality in a .Net application.  So far, I found only 3 approaches to easily update an application:

1. Microsoft Patterns & Practices provide an Updater Application Block v2.0. An application block is a kind of reusable and extensible module. This specific application block provide a quick and easy mean to add self updating capabilities to .NET-based smart client solutions, like Windows Forms applications. Here you can find the Introduction, the Design overview and an article on how to use this application block.
2. Sharp AutoUpdater is a library providing an auto-update feature for .NET applications. It relies on XML configuration files and handles the detection of a new version, downloads, unzips, and installation of the new files.
3. Microsoft also has a ClickOnce deployment solution that handles updates. It is similar to the  java webstart solution. You can find more information here, in this article or among the wikipedia external links

ClickOnce seems fully integrated in a .Net environment, but as far as I know there is no solution to use a standard webserver (not IIS) to handle updates. I should definitely give it a try and see if IIS is really mandatory or if you can use some workaround.

Do you know other methods? Sometimes deployment tools include auto-update container to bundle an generic updater with your application (like install4J).