General news around the Internet

A handy SDK for Facebook apps: www.microsoft.com/facebooksdk

In my Master’s thesis I used Adobe Flash (AS3) and creating games is quite easy in Flash. It’s an ECMA language as is Java, so it’s easy to work with. On the other hand the backend integration is quite tricky. Adobe Flash Media Server is not free, and the universities don’t have licenses for it either. That caused me a lot of problems which were learning experiences for me, but figuring out which open source projects would work was not related to the learning goals I had been trying to achieve with my interactive educational platform. It would be much easier to use .NET development through the entire project than try to provide Bridges between different programming languages through socket programming.

Since there is already guides about ASP.NET development and Facebook, in my opinion it will be easiest to integrate Silverlight with that. Microsoft provides a number of free downloads and free licenses for university students including Visual Studio, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, etc. through the official Microsoft student website www.dreamspark.com, so it’s easy for student projects to get access to their products. Also, the really interesting thing about using Silverlight for your Facebook project would be that it would also work with the new Windows Phone 7 platform that will be released later in 2010.

A collection of possibly useful links:

www.gutenberg.net – Free, in the public domain books. Lots of older books like the Wizard of Oz and some more modern books; it’s mostly only sci-fi publishers are releasing their books into the public domain. http://worldebooklibrary.net/ also distributes these (same) books in .pdf format, but gives you the chance to pay.

Maybe you could try negotiating with one of the services for libraries, such as: http://www.overdrive.com/ or http://www.exacteditions.com/. Basically, after the institution pays, these sites generally allow the members of the institution (numbering in the hundreds of thousands) to read books.

And also on the topic of libraries, you can try a public library. Taipei library has a few different types of ebook collections: http://www.tpml.edu.tw/TaipeiPublicLibrary/index.php?subsite=english&page=english-eresource-index.php

I was also paying for questia.com but the selection is big but oriented towards nonfiction.

www.oreilly.com – It really depends on the type of books that you’re looking at. For computer/tech books, uses the epub format, which might not be so hard to use, since it’s basically just a kind of html with divisions for chapters, etc. Kate did Traditional Chinese translation for their epub reader, but for some reason they haven’t posted that version yet…

Mostly tech books: safaribooksonline.com
For kids: http://www.benchmarkeducation.com/ebookroom

The trouble is you might have problems of scale. You can pay for 10 or 100 books, but if your experiment is on free-choice, that’s not much of a choice. So that’s why I might suggest that you use something like wikipedia or a particular popular online e-magazine as the source. There’s so much to choose from and it’s free~

Now that I’m using c++ again, I’m getting interested in unit tests, of course. But a little research showed me that there has been some reluctance to unity tests in the community, primarily due to the lack of reflection in unmanaged code.

Since unit testing is so awesome, it hasn’t been entirely overlooked, luckily. First I found an interesting question on this at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3159
There’s a good overview of a bunch of different tools there.

I also read a good article by Michael Feather. http://objectmentor.com/resources/ articles/TheHumbleDialogBox.pdf
He explains why we need to separate the smart objects so we can communicate with them. Cool!

I’m also downloading some unit test plugin for Visual Studio. I’ll let you know how that goes!

Just thought that I’d test the capabalities of this phone to post here.

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