So, i'm looking for a bit of help. It's not a particularly hard task, it's just it'll take me a while and i need to go do some study. Basically, i need a method which parses XML-like data and adds the element name and the element contents to a Dictionary. It is fairly trivial, but i don't like the idea of having to think through all the string mangling required ;) First person to get me a method which works gets 10 brownie points.

You need to be able to handle something like this:
http://monoport.com/5078 (sorry for pasting there, but blogger borks on the XML tags)

Thing is, this is, technically speaking, invalid XML. The tag should be escaped, and the '&' in ObjectFileName should also be escaped. Unfortunately, i can't rely on the source of this XML being fixed any time soon, so i need to be able to hand parse the XML. I've outlined a procedure at the end which should be able to handle most of the mess that will be thrown at it. The only thing i'll add is that the manual parser doesn't have to cope with every eventuality. If something goes wrong (for example an artist called themselves which breaks the parsing) then don't worry, just abort. This is a last ditch effort to parse. It should succeed 99% of the time if you follow the procedure below.

Here's some psuedo code:
while(currentIndex < nexttag =" string.IndexOf('<'," elementname =" string.SubString(nextTag,">', currentPosition); // read the element name

currentPosition += the number of characters i've just 'parsed'.
string data = string.SubString(currentPosition, string.IndexOf("'); // The contents are between currentPosition and the end tag.
currentPosition += data.Length;
currentPosition += length of closing tag;

if(nextCharacter != '<') AbortParse(); // If the next character is not '<', then something has gone wrong, so give up. myDictionary.Add(elementName, contents);

When i read the news about gcc supporting CIL a few days ago, the very first thought to cross my mind wasn't "Wow, that's really cool", it was "Wow, i wonder how many people are going to start shouting to not use GCC anymore because it's 'contaminated' with microsoft code and you'll get sued if you try use it for anything".

So should i take it as a good sign that there's no uproar? Have people realised that implementing an open specification cannot get you sued? You never know, it might have happened. Still, it's an amazing achievement. I can't say it's something i'm ever likely to use, but it does have some nice possibilities.

With the mono summit coming up soon, I'm hoping to be able to spare the time from college to head over for at least 2-3 days of it. It'll be interesting to get together with a bunch of people for some hacking or some talking or whatever's going on.

So, if anyone's out there who's interested in talking about/hacking on (or redesigning ;) ) any of the projects i've been working on, or projects similar to them:

MonoTorrent: My pet bittorrent library project
Lunar Eclipse: The xaml designer for silverlight
libgphoto-sharp: The csharp binding for libgphoto - for MTP based media devices
Banshee MTP support: using the above binding

do give me a shout and i'll see what can be arranged. I'm already looking forward to getting some hacking in on F-Spot over the week to port it to the new libgphoto-sharp bindings. Should be fun!

For anyone else who's kinda undecided about going, ah sure gwon! Tis a bit of craic ;)