Develop Reference

Connecting To A Website To Look Up A Word(Compiling Mass Data/Webcrawler)

I am currently developing a Word-Completion application in C# and after getting the UI up and running, keyboard hooks set, and other things of that nature, I came to the realization that I need a WordList. The only issue is, I cant seem to find one with the appropriate information. I also don't want to spend an entire week formatting and gathering a WordList by hand.
The information I want is something like "TheWord, The definition, verb/etc."
So, it hit me. Why not download a basic word list with nothing but words(Already did this; there are about 109,523 words), write a program that iterates through every word, connects to the internet, retrieves the data(definition etc) from some arbitrary site, and creates XML data from said information. It could be 100% automated, and I would only have to wait for maybe an hour depending on my internet connection speed.
This however, brought me to a few questions.
How should I connect to a site to look up these words? << This my actual question.
How would I read this information from the website?
Would I piss off my ISP or the website for that matter?
Is this a really bad idea? Lol.
How do you guys think I should go about this?
EDIT
Someone noticed that Dictionary.com uses the word as a suffix in the url. This will make it easy to iterate through the word file. I also see that the webpage is stored in XHTML(Or maybe just HTML). Here is the source for the Word "Cat". http://pastebin.com/hjZj6AC1

For what you marked as your actual question - you just need to download the data from the website and find what you need.
A great tool for this is CsQuery which allows you to use jquery selectors.
You could do something like this:
var dom = CQ.CreateFromUrl("http://www.jquery.com");
string definition = dom.Select(".definitionDiv").Text();

monitoring most common web browsers c#/vc++/c

i'm trying to do a download manager just for learning cos i'm new in windows programming,
could someone tell me how to monitor most common web browsers,
i'd like to implement something like:
http://www.iwisoft.com/videodownloader/video-downloader-features.php
everytime you visit a web page in common browsers detects all video files in the web page and allow you to download or not the file, any idea how to do that without building an app for every browser, which is the best language to do it c#/vc++/managed/unmanaged,
i'm learning and using a mix of all to do other parts like download files, add rules to firewall or modify the registry
thanks a lot

I don't really know a neat way of doing this, but you could try the following :
Enumerate the name of the current window using GetForegroundWindow.
Check if the name you get using GetWindowText matches the usual name of the browser.
If it is a browser, moniter the clipboard and check for hyperlinks
then do your download stuff.
I program in C++ and assembly, but I wouldn't be able to advice you on the programming language since I don't have any experience with C#. But since you are new, I would suggest starting out with basic stuff. As pointed out in your comment, this is not something that can be achieved easily.

Is there a way to find out programmatically (C#), if JavaScript is enabled in Internet Explorer?

I'm trying to find out in a prerequisite checker tool (written in C#), if Internet Explorer has enabled JavaScript. I don't want to change it ... just read out the information. Is that available somewhere in the registry?

First you need to know what security zone the website(s) that needs javascript would fall under.
When you know what zone you are looking for you can find it under SOFTWARE\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones...
The parameters are not humanreadable though so you'd need to lookup some information regarding those.
However it all feels a bit sketchy doing it this way
I hope that someone can give you a better answer than mine, at least a simpler.

I think modernizr is what you're looking for, it enables you to read the supported features from the HTML tag of your web page.
See:
http://www.modernizr.com/

jQuery + C# code to resolve URL's from user-supplied text

I'd like to add some kind of simple URL resolution and formatting to my C# and jQuery-based ASP.NET web application. I currently allow users to add simple text-based descriptions to items and leave simple comments ('simple' as in I only allow plain text).
What I need to support is the ability for a user to enter something like:
Check out this cool link: http://www.really-cool-site.com
...and have the URL above properly resolved as a link and automagically turned into a clickable link...kinda like the way the editor in StackOverflow works. Except that we don't want to support BBCode or any of its variants. The user experience would actually be more like the way Facebook resolves user-generated URL's.
What are some jQuery + C# solutions I should consider?

There's another question with a solution that might help you. It uses a regex in pure JS.
Personally though, I would do it server-side when the user submits it. That way, you only need to do it once, rather than every time you display that text. You could use a similar regex in C#.

I ended up using server-side C# code to do the linkification. I use an AJAX-jQuery wrapper to call into a PageMethod that does the work.
The PageMethod both linkifies and sanitizes the user-supplied string, then returns the result.
I use the Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library (AntiXSS) to sanitize:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5242
And I use C# code I found here and there to resolve and shorten links using good olde string parsing and regular expressions.
My method is not as cool as the way FaceBook does it in real time, but at least now my users can add links to their descriptions and comments.

Display HTML in a silverlight application

I need to display HTML in my silverlight application and cannot find a way of doing it. I cannot use the web browser control as it needs to be able to run in or out of a browser.
Does anyone know of a good way to do this, because all I can think of doing at the moment is running replace methods on the text to just replace the tags with C# equivalents eg(<br /> to \n).

The way I do it is to check if the application is running inside the browser and change the means of display accordingly. If running inside the browser, I overlay the application with an IFrame, as I describe in this article: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Building-a-Silverlight-Line-Of-Business-Application-Part-6.aspx. Otherwise, I use the WebBrowser control. I have a control which does this all for you in the source code that accompanies my book, which is downloadable from the Apress website here: http://www.apress.com/book/downloadfile/4638.
Hope this helps...
Chris

I believe what you are looking for is HTML Bridge.
Edit I'm am actually now unsure if you'll still have access to javascript if you're running this OOB. I'm going to look into this some more and will further update. I'll still leave the answer up though for reference.
Second Edit Here is what I've found. HTML Bridge is disabled when you run silverlight out of browser. This disables access to the HTML DOM as well as Javascript. However, according to a comment on this site:
HTML Bridge is not available when you first install a OOB app. But you CAN force it if you modify the index.html in the folder where the app is installed just adding the enablehtmlaccess parameter.
It works!
You can even create dynamic HTML elements using the well-known methods of the HtmlPage class. You can even open a new browser window with the Navigate() method and its "_blank" parameter.
Keep in mind this information was posted about SL 3. Its possible that this may have changed, but I doubt it. So it seems that what you may want to do is build a script into the startup of your SL app that detects whether or not your app is running out of browser. If it is then you may want to have some script to call that can modify this file for you.

There recently was a similar question.
I posted a link there to an implementation that parses and displays HTML inline in Silverlight. Of course, it will work only with simple HTML, but maybe you can expand it to your needs.