OK, the first step of Rikxtensible C# has been done. Ever wanted to print "Hello World" via an attribute? This fragment now compiles, and after running through Rikxtensible C# allows the PrivateImportAttribute to provide the code for TestMethod.

class TestClass
	{
		[PrivateImport(), MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.ForwardRef)]
		static extern void TestMethod();

		[STAThread]
		static void Main(string[] args)
		{
			TestMethod();
		}
	}

Obviously, this is only a proof of concept at the moment but soon we'll have compile time code injection for C#.

Dominic's Earley parser is coming along in leaps and bounds. So is it time now to rewrite the RikWik parser? How good would it be to have a grammar for RikWik!

For those you of you who haven't read my non-existant "about me" page, I'm a keen bushwalker/camper, so over Easter Tania and I headed up to Elanda Point for a couple of days with some friends from church. Unfortunately, while there's plenty of space to camp up there, most of it had turned into mud. Still, that's no reason to pack up and go home after driving some three hours through Good Friday traffic.

Another couple from church chose Easter Saturday to get married (congrats to Geoff and Hayley) so most of the group left at 8AM on Saturday to drive from Elanda Point (which is just north of Noosa) to Cabarita on the Northern NSW coast for the wedding - a trip of some 280km. We had a pretty quiet day back at camp on Saturday till they returned about 9PM.

Anyway, I think this entry gives rise to two important issues. Firstly, I'm starting my Bushwalking page to keep track of my walking/camping pursuits. We're already planning to head off for some walking on the May Day weekend (just have to find somewhere to go). Secondly, I'm sure people want me to add some method of filtering out some categories from my RSS feed so they don't have to listen to my boring personal anecdotes.

The RikWik blogging engine now supports comments. Comments can be entered from the website or via the commentAPI which I presume most aggregators support (I've been testing from RSS Bandit). Some also some support for letting comments be entered in wiki format; however, that isn't activated for anonymous users because of potential cross-site scripting issues.

The support for this actually pushed the general RikWik architecture along a bit. RikWik now supports separate .NET objects for different page types and also makes it easier for these objects to supply their own method of rendering pages to different content types (eg. RSS). Originally this type of thing wasn't planned until the next major rewrite of RikWik.

I also had to add some extensions to the RSS.NET to allow it to write out commentAPI and Dublin Core elements. I guess I should clean these up and send them back to the RSS.NET project... I found the RSS.NET modules interface reasonably simple to use. I probably would've done it a bit different but it was pretty simple to add to. I'm not sure whether it's finalised yet or not.

I love a good rant (NOTE: a 'good' rant, not a boring, pointless one) but I don't always have time to develop one myself. Thankfully Joseph Cooney has provided one about developers whining over "broken" APIs - http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/josephcooney/archive/2004/03/31/10410.aspx