First off this last two weeks have been a nightmare with trying to get my site up and running again. Not that it was broken per say but that godaddy my hosting provider does not employ very educated people. I have been having a constant back and fourth with them trying to find out why I am getting compiler errors with the extensions I wrote for blogengine, as godaddy claim to support asp.net 3.5 and my code was using C# 3.0 code syntax and Linq.

Needless to say I had written one final email completley documenting all that had happened and why I think it was not working and pointing out to godaddy support just how wrong and how much they really don't understand what the .net framework is what it is for and how it works on it's own, as well as how asp.net fits into it.

It became very clear to me early on that godaddy support does not employ actual programmers. Programmers that write actual code and who actually have written code for the software that godaddy even offers in there Web Hosting connection etc. Had they had these programmers on call or working as support techs the problem would have been isolated and resolved within hours. Lets just say that the email I wrote and was going to send gave an untimatum at the end of it that said they had 72hrs to figure it out or I would be canceling my account and finding another hosting provider.

Yeah, it had gotten that bad. :(

I was patient up until those final few days when I pretty much snapped over what I considered an easy fix. But to be fair I was in part to blame for my own lact of knoledge, and godaddy was equally to blame for not spotting the problem right away, being as simple as it was to fix. It was a bad situation all around and I am just glad it is over with and I just want to put the whole thing behind me.

Anyhoo! Lets git down to bizzniss. Awwww yeah!  There are two new blog engine extensions availible in the projects page. SilverlightExt, and cbxChangeLogger.

The SilverlightExt extension for BlogEngine allows you to embed [ SILVERLIGHT xap:filenamewithoutext width:640px height:480px ] tags in your pages and posts so that you don't have to deal with writing html <object markup. All you have to do is upload your silverlight *.xap file into the ClientBin folder in the root of your site and type "[ SILVERLIGHT xap:filenamewithoutext width:640px height:480px ]" without spaces after [ and before ].

The cbxChangeLogger is a extension for Blogengine that will track changes that are made on a blogengine site. It will track if you created, deleted, or updated posts and pages. When you want to clear the change log and embed the data in a page or post all you have to do is type [ CHANGELOG ]  ( without a space after [ and before ] ) and the tag will be replaced with the changes that were recored since the last time you specified the [ CHANGELOG ] tag in a page or post.

Also I have had a interest in kodu ever since I heard about it and thought it was awesome. After writing some preliminary AI code in a silverlight game I am working on I realized that I am going to need a better AI framework that I can build on top of rather then having to hobble together code for each project that needs some AI in it. So I started a new project called Ohsai. Ohsai is my attempt to create a AI framework that I can use across various platforms where .net is availible, Here is a screenshot of the class diagram for Ohsai as it stands right now View Screenshot

As you can see it is modled using similar concepts that kodu employs and with a little help from wikipedia to give me a starting place on how my interfaces and types should be structured. I already have a very simple prototype and test app up and running in XNA that uses GamePad <condition> -> <action> to move a actior around the screen. Even with this preliminary code I can see how much easier it is going to be having my own AI framework that I can build on top of. Also it may even allow me to use xml files to declare cirtian behaviors so I can use the XNA content pipeline to Content.Load<> from disk. Woot!

But that's pretty much sums up the last two weeks. I'll be heading up north to pick mushrooms around the 27 or 29 of august and probably won't be back until mid october or so. But I'll try to make another post before I leave.