In the Mac world, there’s a great little library called Sparkle. It uses RSS feeds to facilitate the distribution of software updates, with a minimum of code required in the application. Our illustrious CEO, marc, has been talking about it for a while, and we use it internally in several of our Mac applications.
However, the .Net world doesn’t have anything quite like it. After some discussion about what we needed in such a library, I decided to write shimmer. It will have much of the same functionality as Sparkle does, with some additional things that are necessary for the .Net and Windows environments, as well as being able to run on Mono on most supported platforms. For the time being, it’s an internal project, that will see the light of day first in our new bug tracking client. Will it ever be released further than that? We haven’t decided yet. Let us know if you’re interested, and we’ll consider our options.
I’ll be chronicling my adventures during the design and coding process for shimmer here over the next few weeks. I hope you’ll find it interesting. :)
