roncli.com blog

SVN turns 1000

2010-03-05T17:22:00.004-06:00

Today, I made my 1,000th commit to my SVN server. It wasn't much of a change, reversing a commit that turned debugging on for one of my websites, but it's a milestone nonetheless.

Building up to this, I did a lot of work with the applications and libraries that currently exist on the SVN. Here's a brief summary of what I've done recently:

LibWowArmory got an ItemTooltip class added to it, only a demo application remains before I release version 0.3.

Constellation and Cent both got their libraries in the /lib directory of the SVN, allowing me to develop these applications anywhere, not just at home.

Six Minutes To Release had a ton of work done on it, including the addition of LibMinifier, my JavaScript and CSS minification/combination/compression library. I also replaced WZ Tooltip with jQuery Tooltip, continuing my move towards jQuery on the Six Minutes website.

For now, I will continue to focus on the Six Minutes website, as there are a lot of guild issues that require me to do a lot of coding. After that, however, Gate will be the focus, as I want to get a copy of that up and running before Google shuts down Blogger FTP on May 1st. Granted, I have a backup plan if I don't succeed in that goal, but I'm hoping I can get something quick done by then.

Cleaning Up Code

2010-02-18T17:54:00.002-06:00

I took some time today to update some libraries in my source code, which is affecting a bunch of my projects. Cent, which runs off of CrystalSpace, is getting a makeover of sorts, as I am switching it over from the traditional CrystalSpace build process of linked libs and using DLLs instead. The process is quite nontrivial, as I am finding that I have to modify the Visual Studio solutions a bit to get things working as I need them to.

The biggest issue I'm coming across is trying to get the plugins into the same directory as Cent.exe so that I don't have to carry around a CSPath environment variable. I thought just adding it as a reference would copy it over, but it's not. I'm sure I can resolve this, but I just ran out of time today.

The other fun makeover I'll need to do involves Constellation, my Planarity clone. It runs off SDL, which, along with a slew of other libraries, are in a bunch of directories outside of my SVN directory. I'm going to try to get those all together and get a functional build of both Cent and Constellation before I continue working on any of the code in there.

Once I'm done, it's back to Six Minutes. I have a LOT of cool stuff planned over there, and a lot of coding to do to get it done. With some extra spare time the last week or so, I'm trying to knock out things that I've been wanting to do for a while but just haven't had the chance. We'll see how far this goes.

MSDN

2010-02-01T13:53:00.004-06:00

Last week, I finally got a hold of my own MSDN Subscription (no, you can't have any software). So far I've setup Successor on Windows 2008 as the new domain controller and my primary computer, Ox, is running Windows 7. There were a few install woes with my Windows 7 that were resolved after disconnecting all other drives, but once I got past that it was pretty easy.

Soon Understudy will be on Windows 2008 as well, but there is going to have to be a lot of planning going into that. Understudy is my web server, SQL server, SVN server and mail forwarder, among other things. I plan on moving SQL to Successor, replacing 602 Lan Suite with something to forward my mail to GMail, and redoing the web server as IIS 7.

Then I start playing with the development tools. Expression Studio 3 is something I want to dive into and see what I can do with, and of course Visual Studio 2010 is around the corner, with the beta already out. There's a lot of fun stuff for me to play with, should keep me fairly occupied for a while.

Leaving CTG, Closing OSMusic.Net

2009-11-30T16:19:00.002-06:00

Just a quick note that I've tendered my resignation at CTG and am going to be closing OSMusic.Net soon. I just can't dedicate myself to music websites anymore due to lack of time and motivation. Some would say it's for the best.

As for OSMusic.Net, I'm mulling over offering refunds to those who did try to keep the site going with credits and stuff. I will keep an archive of the songs on OSMusic.Net similar to the archive I keep of TiS1. I currently do not plan on creating an archive of TiS2.

The Nightstalker is not going away. I am still a musician at heart and that will never change. I just hope that I someday will get the motivation to get back into creating music, but unfortunately I do not see that day coming any time soon.

Riding the Wave

2009-11-11T14:42:00.002-06:00

Last night I had a surprise waiting for me in my inbox: a Google Wave invitation!

I spent the majority of last night playing in various multiplayer Sudoku waves and checking out many of the other public waves available. The implementation is very nice. I haven't done a whole lot so far, but this post here is my first attempt at using Bloggy, the robot that publishes stuff to your blog. [ed: It failed. Bloggy's not working yet.] There's also Tweety for Twitter, and about half a gazillion more that I haven't even discovered yet.

Having very few contacts makes it difficult for me to do anything productive here, but it's really neat to be able to check out the latest Google technology. And before you ask, all my invitations are spoken for. Sorry!

XAML again?

2009-10-24T16:46:00.003-05:00

Back in January of last year, I started work on the Six Minutes To Release website using Silverlight. It... didn't go so well. People couldn't use it on Macs, and there were other fugly things about it I didn't like. I ended up abandoning the project and coding it in straight ASP.Net.

Turns out that the XAML experience I got from working on it the first time through the SMTR website came in handy. The Rawr project is using Silverlight for its next major release, Rawr 3. Having taken on the protection paladin module, I was able to write a needed piece for that module to work in Rawr 3 in about 3 days on and off. Of course, the stumbling of not having touched it in nearly 2 years took me some time to get past, but once I did it was smooth sailing.

There's a few things I don't like about it, though. Rawr is going to release a Silverlight web release and a WPF application release. The problem with the two releases is that the XAML used in each is not necessarily compatible with each other in all cases. This results in being unable to use certain features, such as StringFormatting. We also have to use a cheap preprocessing approach to be able to compile the same XAML file in both places.

Is it me, or could Microsoft have done a better job of streamlining the two versions? Why even have two versions of XAML? It seems like a lot of extra work for similar functionality that could be done all in one place.

In any case, I've put a lot on my plate, and I've devoted this weekend to getting it out. Up next, SMTR's new raid performance reporting, which is almost done. Should be fun.

LibWowHeroes 3.2.2

2009-10-11T04:25:00.003-05:00

It appears I'm amassing a nice amount of .Net libraries for World of Warcraft. My latest offering is for WoW Heroes, and is a .Net library for accessing their XML files. It's called, predictably, LibWowHeroes. Yeah, sorry for not being original, but at least you know what to expect!

Unlike my other libraries, this is a full release. With it you can query WoW Heroes for a guild and return lots of WoW Heroes-specific data from it. Unfortunately, I don't have manual character updates working yet, but that will be something I will work on soon. And WoW Heroes data will be coming to Six Minutes To Release very soon.

An Experiment

2009-10-02T17:53:00.003-05:00

Six Minutes To Release seems to be my favorite testing grounds for experimental code lately. Fortunately, the RSS experiment was a success.

This one involves moving the ViewState off of the HTML page and on to the database. Some of the ViewStates were getting huge, even when I'd try to manage the size of the ViewState. So I decided to take that out of the HTML to slim some pages down. So far it seems to be working, but it hasn't been up for too long.

This caused me to rethink my ASP.Net model, and I ended up putting data that I usually store in a separate class, such as login information, into the class that inherits System.Web.UI.Page. Makes it much cleaner in my opinion, as I don't have to store references to Response, Request, and Server.

So we'll see how this goes. This is all based on an idea I got for Gate, and if it goes well I'll end up using it in Gate as well. Should be fun.

Gate

2009-09-21T01:39:00.003-05:00

In a recent post, I mentioned that I was combining roncli.com, my projects site, and this blog into one website. Well, work on it has begun, and it's called Gate. The name Gate is actually short for Aggregate, which I will somehow work into the main theme.

Gate itself aims to be an open source, modular project. The first three modules will be a wiki, a Blogger-supported blog, and a project management module. I've been working on the SQL Server database setup the last week and a half or so and have it just about completed. Now I gotta write the repair script, which is what happens when installation goes wrong. It's been pretty fun, as I've been using jQuery and jQuery UI for the interface, allowing for the installation to be robust and user friendly.

The challenge is going to be figuring out how I want to do the modules. There are two problems to solve here. First, I need to figure out how to handle database usage between the modules and the core application. I'm using LINQ to SQL to build the data structures and synchronizing them with SMO, so theoretically the modules could use a separate LINQ to SQL file for the same database, but that might not be very optimal.

Second, I need to figure out if I am going to be able to just drag and drop modules into the /bin directory or if I'm going to have to compile it into the main website. The design strategy is to keep things simple for the user to install, so it would be nice if I didn't have to recompile things for every module. I know how to do plugins for desktop applications, as I have in Solar, a TCP/IP text processing engine that I've written that allows users to write their own plugins to process the text however they want to. Would it work for websites, or even make sense for them? That is the challenge ahead of me.

The nice part of it, like I said, is that it's open source. I'm doing this mostly for myself, and if others can get good use out of it, that's great. And if I can get others to help out with the code, that's even better. But until I have a functional version, I'm pretty much just going to write the core module plus the wiki, blog, and projects modules myself. Once the new roncli.com is online, then I'll look into releasing Gate as its own project.

LibWowArmory 0.2.1 beta

2009-09-08T16:35:00.003-05:00

Blizzard decided in the latest World of Warcraft patch to add items that are only usable by one of the factions while providing an item with exact stats but different looks to the other faction. LibWowArmory, my VB.Net Armory parser, has picked up on this, and thus version 0.2.1 is released.

Cleanup day

2009-09-04T16:56:00.002-05:00

I suppose today is cleanup day.

I removed achaea.roncli.com and d3tl.org from my server. The source code to these sites can be found in my Subversion repository at svn://www.roncli.com/ronclipro/old/Websites.

If it's the data you're after, I have backed up all the SQL Server information, which is available upon request.

PXO Pilot aliases

2009-09-04T16:38:00.002-05:00

Remember PXO? If so, you probably remember some people who loved their aliases, often griefing people to no end.

For fun, I compiled a list of pilots along with their possible aliases from a period of about a year. I ran an IRC bot on the PXO's server and tracked every person that entered a channel. The bot was hidden because it never actually joined a channel, but it could use standard IRC commands to see who was in what channel and to get additional information about them. Yes, I was a sneaky bastard.

It served no real purpose. This was back in the days when I was cynical and bored, and had nothing better to code. Oh, the days. So anyway, I figured I'd at least share the information I collected, and you can go back and laugh at the good old days.

Oh, if only there was a Descent 4.

As if I don't have enough to do

2009-09-04T14:04:00.003-05:00

In addition to working on my personal projects (including the Six Minutes To Release website and the associated libraries), leading a 7-day a week WoW raiding guild, and somehow still finding time to sleep, I've decided to participate in the open source development of Rawr, an equipment planner and optimizer for World of Warcraft.

Primarily, I'll be working on the protection paladin module, as the primary handler of that module has stopped working on it. Already I've fixed some bugs from the latest version, and the module should be usable again in the next release. I really don't plan on adding a whole lot, there's already a lot of good stuff in there. My goal is to make sure that there's as little down time as possible between patches so that protection paladins can stay up to date with the kind of gear that they need.

FeedPage

2009-09-01T13:48:00.002-05:00

Because the code is so short, I've decided to just go ahead and post the code to FeedPage here. Remember, you must have a reference to the ASP.Net RSS Toolkit in order to compile this.

Imports RssToolkit.Rss
Imports System.Web.UI

Namespace roncliProductions.LibFeedPage

Public MustInherit Class FeedPage
Inherits Page

Protected Overrides Sub OnPreInit(ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
MyBase.OnPreInit(e)
Dim strFeed As String = Request.QueryString("feed")
If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(strFeed) Then
If strFeed = "atom" Or strFeed = "opml" Or strFeed = "rdf" Or strFeed = "rss" Then
Response.ContentType = "text/xml"
Select Case strFeed
Case "atom"
Response.Write(GetFeed().ToXml(DocumentType.Atom))
Case "opml"
Response.Write(GetFeed().ToXml(DocumentType.Opml))
Case "rdf"
Response.Write(GetFeed().ToXml(DocumentType.Rdf))
Case "rss"
Response.Write(GetFeed().ToXml(DocumentType.Rss))
End Select
End If
Response.End()
End If
End Sub

Protected MustOverride Function GetFeed() As RssDocument

End Class

End Namespace

Easy enough. To use, simply change your inheritance from System.Web.UI.Page to roncliProductions.LibFeedPage.FeedPage, and inside that construct and return an RssDocument object. Then, when you add ?feed=xml to the URL of the page, you will get an RSS feed.

Fastest. Project. Evar.

2009-09-01T00:56:00.004-05:00

I've decided that I'm going to write a website that combines my three main personal sites: Projects, roncli.com, and this blog.

One of the biggest features of this site is the ability to easily add an RSS feed to a webpage without having to write separate pages or nasty ASP.Net http handlers. Basically what I wanted was to have URL's that look like "...page.aspx" load the usual aspx, but "...page.aspx?feed=rss" load the RSS feed instead of the normal page.

This idea led me to the ASP.Net RSS Toolkit, a very easy to use toolkit with some nice features. Including the ability to quickly make RSS feeds. That, combined with a 34-line class (counting 6 blank lines) that inherits from System.Web.Ui.Page, overrides OnPreInit, and forces inheriting classes to override a GetFeed function, and I'm ready to create feeds not only in RSS, but also Atom, OPML, and RDF as well.

Wow. The demo app was more challenging to write than this gem.

I want to give it a test run, probably on some Six Minutes To Release pages, and see if it's stable. However, shortly thereafter I will probably release this to CodePlex so that other people can get their hands on it. I am rapidly becoming addicted to RSS feeds since my iPhone reads em pretty good using Byline. I have feeds from all over the Internet, and it's nice to be able to have one central place to find out what's going on in my own little corner of the world.

LibWowArmory 0.2 beta

2009-08-30T19:22:00.002-05:00

I finally got around to updating LibWowArmory to include not only the latest changes to the Armory's XML data, but now it also includes information about reputation, achievements, statistics, and character calendar information.

It's taken me 8 months to go from one version to the next, and with all the bouncing around I do on projects, it's really no surprise that it takes me forever to do these kind of things. Although I do have plans to add guild and arena team information, I doubt that's going to come around for a while, unless someone offers some help with the project.

Next on the plate for me? Something to replace trac...

LibWowArmory coming along slowly

2009-08-27T16:55:00.003-05:00

I've been spending a lot of time with LibWowArmory lately, largely because the current version is broken due to 3.2 Armory changes. My two main goals are to finish off the character data (I have 3 tabs left), and create a demo application.

Well, today I finished the demo application with all of the existing data I have. It's basically a command line version of the Armory, a 2,339-lines-of-code monster that took way longer than I had hoped it would. Of course, that's because over half of that has to do with the Item Search feature. It's crazy because of all the filters that exist.

What irks me about that, though, is that the Armory is a version behind on some of the filters. For instance, there is no filter for Emblems of Triumph yet. Because of the erratic updating they do to their own website, I've actually been thinking of making an app that downloads some .xml data, compares versions, and alerts me when there has been changes.

There's just so much I want to do programmatically with WoW, but I just don't have time to make it all happen at once. Sometimes I wish I had help on these things, but finding interested developers that are committed to help is a problem that's tough to solve.

Yahoo! Pipes

2009-08-25T12:34:00.002-05:00

While I was on my honeymoon, I discovered Yahoo! Pipes, which is an interesting feed aggregation service. The nice thing about it is that it has super advanced features that allow you to do things like, well, this.

The premise is simple, just display the last 5 achievements earned by the player in question. But since the data is coming from an XML page, a lot needs to be done to format it into a feed.

The original version of this was found for th EU servers, I just modified it to be compatible with the US servers. But the possibilities appear to be endless. Worth a try if you like tinkering with data.

Out With the Old and In With the New

2009-08-20T23:13:00.001-05:00

First of all, my apologies if this post comes across strangely. I've decided to ditch LifeCast since it can no longer connect to Blogger. Instead, I am using something called Pingle. There doesn't appear to be any obvious place to put a title, so I will fix it if it breaks.

this will allow me to also post to Twitter, so I may begin to actually use twitter.com/roncli for micro-blogging. We shall see.

In any case, off for some sleep, there's a long day of Blizzcon ahead of me tomorrow.

LibBeImba 0.1.1 beta

2009-07-29T18:00:00.003-05:00

I've updated my LibBeImba project to version 0.1.1 beta. The major change with this version is that I decided to write a function that actually updates the toon's data on BeImba. This means that you don't have to manually update your toons yourself, you just have to call this function. There's also a demo application that shows how to use the LibBeImba library.

I'm working on an update to my other WoW-related project, LibWowArmory, next, as the current version is incompatible with the current Armory due to changes made earlier this month.

Married Life

2009-07-16T03:01:00.004-05:00

Ah, the married life.

Um, it seems to be the same as unmarried life.

Anyway, it's been far too long since I've posted here. First of all, you'll notice a new picture! This is from my wedding, and probably will be the one I use online going forward, as opposed to that silly surprise smile face from 2001. I'll likely still use my side Vegas photo occasionally, but this is going to be my common photo for the time being.

I'm still heavily addicted to World of Warcraft. Six Minutes to Release is still going strong, and I have done a lot with it since my last update. Right now I'm working on updating the broken LibWowArmory to work with all of Blizzard's latest Armory changes. Woo, this post is already linkerific.

Cent has resurfaced as a project when I discovered C++/CLI. Basically, all the calls to Crystal Space are done in C++/CLI while I do the actual game logic in Visual Basic.Net. It's not been without its difficulties, though. For instance, passing a System.String from VB.Net into C++/CLI for use as a char* parameter without causing a memory leak was interesting. I finally came up with this function:

const char* Marshalling::StringToConstCharPointer(String^ strIn) {
marshal_context^ context = gcnew marshal_context();
return context->marshal_as(strIn);
}

So far, I've gotten a blank screen with an FPS counter in the upper right touching 2,400 fps. I'm currently working on the static loader module that loads the images, music, and other various files needed by Crystal Space. Then I get to start working on the menu, which will be designed a heck of a lot smarter than the old one was. That is, no more 10,000 line classes.

The only thing I have yet to figure out is the new event system of Crystal Space, which is probably just for lack of trying. Right now I cannot handle keyboard, mouse, or joystick input without breaking the frame processor. If I try to handle all events, the frame event doesn't fire. If I comment out the part that handles all events, the frame event works fine. I'm sure I'll figure it out with time.

My music has, unfortunately, been put on hold. I just don't have the time nor the proper equipment to do anything with it. I've probably written half a dozen songs in my head in that time, but the overall motivation to actually do something with it is mostly gone. Hopefully next year I can get something from Open Labs and get myself out of this funk.

And finally as a footnote, I am quite into Kado Kado, a competitive mini game website. I am doing really well in Iron Chouquette, Ellon in the Dark, Opalus Factory, and for some reason Cooking Lili. I absolutely hate Cooking Lili. But I'm good at it. Bleh. But seriously, many of the games are fun, and they're coming out with more all the time. You can play five times per day for free, or if you become heavily addicted like me, you can buy the ability to play more.

The last word

2009-02-25T14:19:00.003-06:00

As a note, I wrote this 5 months ago and forgot about it. I dug it up today and edited it a bit after I decided I was going to post something similar on the subject, and realized this said everything I wanted to say and more. So, without further ado.

Firstly, this will be my final post on the TiS beta. I have no intention of returning to the site in any social or administrative capacity.

Two major things have contributed to this decision. Firstly is simply Saurin's lack of interest in the site. Whatever happened to him between the site's release and now surely hurt any potential the site could have reached. He had a grand idea on how things were going to work in principle, but in practice they just didn't work out at all. That's not anyone's fault, that's just the way it played out. However, had he stuck around and maintained interest in the site, the problems with his system could have had a chance to have been fixed, or resolved in a way reasonably acceptable to the community. Instead, he chose to focus on easy things, mostly related to forum improvements, instead of confronting the problems head on. When I put together the Trac site complete with SVN source access, he had no ambition to contribute or even try to get involved with it. It's a shame, because I had worked up what I believed to be a decent-sized team of people who wanted to actually work on this stuff. Can I blame him for this? No, because his life is his own. If he doesn't believe that Trax in Space is an important part of his life anymore, I have no right to say that he needs to be responsible for it.

The second, and really the more insignificant factor, was the community itself. I say "insignificant" not because the community is insignificant, but because if the first issue hadn't existed, I probably would have been able to better put up with people criticizing the way I handled the site. No doubt Saurin would have taken some time to actually help out with the issues had he shown some interest in his own site.

There were a few factors that contributed to this:
- My abrasive, tell-it-like-it-is style of moderation
- Lack of respect for the spirit of the site
- Lack of respect for others in the community

I admit I took an over-the-top approach to moderation at Trax in Space. At first, I tried to come across as a no-nonsense personality that wasn't going to take shit from anyone. The problem was that this personality was extremely simple to channel anger through, and let me leave no doubt that a few situations on Trax in Space got me angry enough to do so unchecked, starting with the Ashwood situation. Sure, I had some infamous "flame wars" with Spectra and Simeon before that, but I always found those fun.

Once Saurin imparted some responsibility on me, though, I tried to carry out his wishes to the best of my ability. One of those responsibilities was to cut down on the amount of copyright material posted. Now, what Trax in Space should have been doing with copyrighted material was long a subject of controversy. I took my stance from the many name-and-shame schemes that other sites used in the past. I think, looking back, I took that too far. But at the same time, the reaction I was getting was confusing. From the removals of no-name artists I got praise, but from the removals of artists with some reputation on the site I often got a lot of negative feedback. It seemed like it was one of those things where I was expected to apply the standard to everyone except people's friends. This perspective didn't help any in tempering my responses.

Up to this point, I had already been upset with people breaking the spirit of the site. The main purpose and underlying goal of the site was to share your music with your friends. Everything else was just a bonus. Yet there would come along people who would make anonymous accounts with the seeming intention of provoking people.

This just made Trax in Space seem like a circus to me. I enjoyed Trax in Space for what it was for, and that was sharing music. These "artists" were merely interruptions that made TiS less enjoyable for me, and I'm almost certain that other people who decided to try the site to listen to some music were wondering what the hell they were listening to and just never came back. Things like this never help, but when someone's objective is to lift themselves or their friends up at the expense of others you can't really expect much in the way of morality.

TiS was also plagued with people who not only failed to respect the spirit of the site, but they also refused to respect other individuals, especially in cases where their opinion was in opposition to them. Too many threads would erupt in anger because people just couldn't get through their head that someone's ideas could possibly be different than theirs. I guess this is normal.

As for my administrative role, I stand by my removal of all music I removed. When proven wrong I put it back. It wasn't a big deal when that happened, and it's what I thought Saurin wanted for the better of the site. Without him around to guide the process, I took it over. Until he made the decision to keep things up until the copyright owners complained about it, my actions were consistent with what was necessary. I feel I went over the top, though, when it involved people that I considered to have a certain status in the community. Perhaps my intention was to make examples of big names, or to show people that no one's exempt from the rules. Whatever it was, it backfired due to my fiery presentation and resolve of the community to protect one of their own. Okay, so the response I got was more than acceptable.

However, it must be noted that this point by itself, my handling of my administrative duties, was never that big a deal to me, and still isn't. It alienated me from a few people, but really, I can handle the heat and own up to what I did whether right or wrong. So really, the above paragraph isn't as major of a contributing factor to my demeanor towards the community as one who was familiar with the situations in question may think.

The truth is, Trax in Space is going nowhere. Saurin's not going to suddenly come back and fix everything. The community's not going to suddenly gain respect for what TiS2 is trying to do. Nothing I could have said or done could have changed this. I tried, because I really believed in what Saurin wanted to accomplish, but when I realized that the community was more interested at entertaining themselves than help in furthering the site, my interest was gone.

Perhaps us music website operators expect too much of our users.

The Finished Product

2009-02-10T10:58:00.002-06:00

It's hard to finish something a year after you intended to be finished with it. It makes you feel like you've got nothing done over that period of time. But with as little as I've been able to work on projects in my free time, the Six Minutes To Release website is finally in a somewhat finished state.

The last week has seen me make various bug fixes and LINQ optimizations to allow the site to run faster, but nothing new has gone in, and I think it'll stay that way for a while. The Equipment Planner's been a big hit with the guild members so far, and I've always thought in the back of my mind about taking that a step further and spinning it off into its own website. Indeed, it may be something I eventually do, but for now I think I'm content with admiring the finished product, and perhaps work on something else for a while.

The biggest thing for me is that I've finished a project. For those that have been following this blog, you may know that it is difficult for me to finish things I start, but I managed to see this one through despite the long time from development to final release. Sure, I'll add things here and there, but the original plans I made were followed. That's a boost to my confidence, and hopefully something I can draw off of for wherever my next project lands.

Deja vu

2009-02-06T10:44:00.001-06:00

Hmm. Apparently, I did post on LibWowArmory, but when I looked at my blog page the other day, it never got published. WTF?

LibWowArmory 0.1

2009-02-03T17:25:00.003-06:00

I totally forgot to post this. Not so long ago, I released LibWowArmory on CodePlex. It's a .NET library for interfacing with the World of Warcraft Armory.

It's not complete, but I have it looking up important stuff, like items and characters. You can also extensively search as if you were searching from the Armory itself. Well, you are searching from the Armory itself, really, using the same queries available on their website.

I want to add lots of stuff to this, such as Achievements and Arena Teams, but right now this will do, because that's all I need for the Six Minutes website. I'm hoping at some point I'll be able to revisit this library and complete it, because it's pretty nice to be able to just call this stuff from code and not have to worry about the implementation of HTTP.