AIML: Success!

So I managed to get it going. It's a complete hack and I don't have the code handy right now (I'll post it later tonight) but the gist of it is this:

I tracked down an older and simpler copy of the AIMLBot C# source which was written against the really, really old (in computing terms) dot net 1.0 library. I figured that given that it was so ancient, the 2008 c# compiler should be able to upgrade this easily since there've been a lot of years in between.

I was right. So I downloaded the code, made it into a C# 2008 project and added said project to the aurora sim codebase. Then I added a reference in the aurora.botmanager subproject to the AIMLBot project and added a line of Using AIMLBot; to the namespace references at the top.

Then I was able to access the functions in AIMLBot so it was then a case of looking for "what has the user said to the bot?" and "what is the bot's response to what the user has said?" types of calls in the AIMLBot code.

Luckily there a fairly straightforward piece of sample code whereby there was a simple form where you typed into a text box and the bot responded in another textbox with it's answer, so I cut and pasted that code into the right places in the rexbot.cs class and ran it.

No joy. It still crashed out because the bot decided to talk itself into an infinite loop and crashed the stack.

Luckily I was able to track down the venerable Latif Khalifa, author of the awesome piece of client side software, radegast. I know he had basically solved the infinite feedback loop because the AIMLBot code is already in radegast, just I couldn't figure out the hooks.
He pointed me to the one line of code in radegast and I just translated that into the equivalent in the rexbot.

Basically it's a check to make sure that it's a human speaking and that it doesn't have the same name as the bot or else is not an empty message. That basically takes care of all the crappy messages which send the bot into infinite tailspin.

Result was I got a server side bot that talks. Suh-weet.

It still has a glitch though in that the bot refers to *everyone* as "unknown user".
But that's positively a minor issue for now which I'll work on later.

Later tonight I'll post the code on here because I'm too dumb to figure out how to commit to github without overwriting my own changes LOL.