Cool projects that don’t exist

Every now and then I need some modules, components or code snippets for my various projects only to find out on Google that they don’t exist. No one have invented/published/written them and that’s a shame. Here is a list of some of the things I’d like to have someone (other than myself) write and publish as open source:

1. Silverlight XHTML editor

All the JavaScript based editors such as TinyMCE, FCKeditor and FreeTextBox are all pretty nice, but they are still not quite there. With Silverlight we can now make something truly spectacular. Think of adding images to a blog post and harvest all the imaging power of the System.Drawing namespace right there. It would be able to build something better, faster, nicer (XAML for God sake!) and totally integrated into your ASP.NET application.

2. OpenID membership provider for ASP.NET

OpenID is a promising authentication technology that I would like to play with in various projects including BlogEngine.NET. There are already some ASP.NET controls and libraries out there, but no membership provider. I don’t want to use a library and then have to write the membership provider on top of that. I want a single C# file that I can just register in the web.config and voila!

It doesn’t matter if it uses SQL or XML because that can fairly easily be converted and I need both.

3. ASP.NET MonsterID implementation

A MonsterID is an auto generated image that is based on an e-mail address. The same e-mail always produces the same monster. The image of a monster is based on various different pieces such as body, 2 eyes, hair, arms and legs. These images come in multiple varieties and is put together based on the e-mail address and an algorithm. The monster parts can be from the Combinatoric.Critters website or from the MonsterID download for PHP. The idea is that it should be used instead of Identicons and use the e-mail instead of the IP address.

What I need is a single HttpHandler that renders the image and serves it based on a hashed e-mail address provided from the query string. It must save the rendered image on disk, so it doesn’t have to recreate it every time it loads.

So if you are bored this summer, why not create something that doesn’t exist and claim the fame?