Gecko# interaction

Implementing the ASP.NET GUI designer with Mozilla’s Gecko web rendering engine is an obvious decision: it’s open-source, has strong standards support and a large feature set, is highly extensible and flexible thanks to its XPCOM component system, and using Gecko# it can be embedded in a GTK# GUI. Mozilla is becoming an application platform, with XUL for declaratively writting GUIs, and JavaScript for program logic.

ASP.NET GUI Designer

Hello everyone! (waves to as-yet nonexistent audience)

I finally bring to you some useful content in my blog. I have been accepted onto Google’s Summer of Code and will be working with the Mono Project to bring you a user-friendly graphical designer for ASP.NET, which will be integrated into the MonoDevelop IDE.

I will be chronicling any interesting developments right here for your amusement and gratification. Stay tuned!

How embarrassing

Three months since I last posted on this site, and all of those early posts were just about setting the site up. Seems lie the site’s a bit pointless, really. Not that I’ve been sitting idle; I’ve been snowed under with academic work. I’ll get something interesting up here eventually, I promise.

For now, let it be known that I am procrastinating my exam revision by upgrading the site to Drupal 4.6.

Spam, spam, spam, spam....

The site’s only been up for five days and I’m already getting referrer spam. No comment spam yet, but I’ll probably disable comments and trackbacks until I have some interesting stuff up, and sort it out then.

GeSHi Code Filter module

I couldn’t find a Drupal module to syntax highlight C# code, so I made one. I’m using the Generic Syntax Highlighter, GeSHi, to drive a filter loosely based on the codefilter module. While doing this, I discovered Nonstop Bits’ Nonstop HiLighter module, which highlight many more languages, but I think GeSHi produces prettier output colours :). The next version will be supporting mixed-language files, such as PHP, CSS and JavaScript in XHTML, which looks amazing. It’s also very configurable and can output line numbers and XHTML Strict/CSS code, and it wouldn’t be hard to add options to the filter to turn these options on.

Progress is a good thing

I wasn’t quite as far as I thought I was.

There were still a few PostgreSQL bugs in Drupal that I had to fix before getting on with theming the site. This turned out to be too big a task for an evening so I modified the Drupal port of Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme, changing the title picture (anyone recogise the mountain?) and the footer, hacking the template so that the sidebar vanishes if it has no content, and making a few other tweaks. Personally I still have my reservations about a fixed-width layout like this - even though it’s very pretty - so when I have time I’ll fix it up to use relative units.

Some ideas concerning RPGs

Introduction

Computer role playing games (RPGs) are a very popular form of entertainment. They allow the player to assume a new character in a different world, and either may be as far from reality as desired. The game is much like a book, except that the player is the main character, and often can influence what happens.

And so it begins...

I’ve been wondering for literally months how to set up this site. I almost went with a custom coded solution but Drupal’s logging and modular ‘plug-in features’ were ultimately too alluring. The critical question, as always - what would be the best layout? Which modules to use to categorise and display my projects? How do I make all these features work together?