JNI and Cygwin
From time to time, I have to resort to writing native code to get highly Windows-specific things to work in Java. A good example is support for Visual SourceSafe in JDeveloper, which I've been working on as a "background task" since what feels like the beginning of time. It's turning out to be a pretty gnarly chunk of C code (possibly the most C I've written... ever) that uses OLE to talk to SourceSafe, with a nice friendly Java API over the top.
Mostly, I've used Visual Studio.NET to do JNI development. Today, I was trying to fix something for WinLAF using JNI, and since I don't have a copy of VS.NET at home, was hunting around for alternatives. Found this pretty neat guide to using Cygwin for JNI development on Windows - though mostly I just needed to know which arguments to pass into gcc - From this guide, I got that, it works, can now do JNI stuff without waiting about 24 hours for the VS.NET installer to complete. Yay :)
A discussion about flashing Windows taskbar icons in Java on the JavaDesktop.org forums also led me to the (beautifully designed) JNIWrapper website. It looks like a pretty useful utility (even if it is a bit too commercial for WinLAF). Having done integration between Java and an OLE API the "hard" way, I can now truly see the benefit of this kind of utility :)
6:29:37 AM 
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