So I ended up working out a method to load plugins - it's a hybrid of Royo's Extensibility Application Block and the method used by RssBandit. Now, I do have rudimentary spell checking in my dogfood version of PostXING (again :), but I'm having trouble figuring out how to handle the dictionary files.

By default, NetSpell looks for a culture-sensitive .dic(tionary) file from the Application.StartupPath (I think - when trying to launch PostXING from the BlogThisUsingPostXINGPlugin, it complains that it cannot find the file...\bin\RssBandit\en-US.dic) I manually copied the en-US.dic file to PostXING's root folder and it works when launching the program by itself.

The thing is that you can specify which dictionary file you want to use in the component as well as where that file is located. This would be helpful in situations where your CultureInfo is set to something other than English, but you mainly post to your blog using the English language. I'm thinking that I might be able to address this using something like the IBlogExtension idea of HasConfiguration or HasEditingGUI or a combination of the two. This means that this part of PostXING is gonna take a little bit longer to finish than I originally thought - I want to get it right, ya know?

Also, I don't know how I'm going to handle the distribution of the dictionary files - NetSpell comes with these by default:

de-DE.dic
en-AU.dic
en-CA.dic
en-GB.dic
en-US.dic
es-ES.dic
es-MX.dic
fr-FR.dic
it-IT.dic

with a combined size of nearly 10MB. (The biggest one is de-DE at 2.1Mb). There's no way I could host all of these on ProjectDistributor - that would be an abuse of a great service. I am so open to ideas on how to address this one it's not even funny. The spell checker is pretty well useless without a good dictionary file to back it up. Anyways, these are the issues I'm facing while trying to get this great spell checking component implemented as a plugin. Happy New Year!

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