I’ve been playing around with the C# language for a while. It’s a really fun language, and it makes it easy to do a lot of powerful things (threading, database access, sockets, etc). Today I just got a working example that reads messages from a MySQL database and then processes it and sends it to the proper recipient on the Freenode IRC server. I was using the MySQL connector for .NET to talk to the database, and a lame little IRCClient class that I have started writing.

This is all working towards a daemon to use for my BZFlag hosting service. The goals of the daemon are to:

• Determine what work to process by reading data from MySQL;
• Send email and IRC notifications of different events, such as a server going down, reports from a server, and so on;
• Start/stop/restart server instances via SSH;
• Upload and update server configurations and maps via SSH;
• Process log files coming back from game servers.

I would also have a web interface, likely written in PHP, that would add work to the database, as well as provide an interface to server configuration and log data.