A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how I might manage to alter the forum app to allow plugins to alter the way topic and posts were displayed and added. My main design goal was to minimize changes to markup, and I think I finally found a good solution. Of course, I get stuck in these framework moments and try to design for every possible scenario, which is stupid since I'm pretty much the only one who ever uses it.
So I was able to add in just a couple of placeholder controls to the markup, and the rest works in code. The first try will be to adapt the news forum on CB, which already work with some hard coded stuff to swap out the first post with the news item control. If that works out, I think I'll try something really wacky and mashed up.
I've been looking at a whole bunch of source code lately for various libraries out there. There's a really cool C# library that does Jpeg manipulation, and it has no dependencies on the .NET Framework so it works in Silverlight (think resize and upload, a la Facebook's Java thingy). Google has an extensive class library for use against many of their services, including YouTube and the apps. Lots of neat stuff out there.
The guys at work are jQuery ninjas, and I've had fun toying with it. I used it once on CB for drag-and-drop track records, but beyond that it integrates really well with Visual Studio and the ASP.NET AJAX framework. So much cool stuff.
I'm actually writing code at work for the moment, as there's a fairly intense project that needs attention. That means I'll probably be less motivated to work on my own projects, but I'm going to let myself be OK with that for a change.
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