I recently did some research on control adapters, another new feature of ASP.NET 2.0 that I read about in the book “Essential ASP.NET 2.0” by Fritz Onion and Keith Brown. Control adapters allow you to change the rendering of web controls so you can replace tables with divs. Microsoft provides some examples for rendering a few controls in a more CSS friendly format at their web site: http://www.asp.net/cssadapters/ – ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters 1.0.
Control adapters use .browser files to determine the browser capabilities for rendering web controls according to the browser quirks. Unfortunately, these .browser files are not being kept up to date. For example, there is no .browser file for the Safari browser. I may create a safari.browser file because this represents another opportunity. I am finding a lot of opportunities for simple projects that would fulfill a need in the developer’s community. It seems there are a lot of minor things that other developer’s have not given any attention to due to the overwhelming breadth and scope of new technology today.
While researching control adapters I can across a programming language syntax highlighting component created by Wilco Bauwer which you can find at: http://www.wilcob.com/Wilco/Toolbox/SyntaxHighlighter.aspx. I’ve been using Microsoft’s QuickStart highlighter to convert my ASP.NET code into HTML for my help content but that requires a somewhat tedious process of cut and paste steps. I’ve used Wilco Bauwer’s Syntax Highlighter to create a windows application program that makes it easier for me to highlight my code and document it as HTML. Unfortunately, this syntax highlighting component isn’t perfect because it does not highlight the word WHERE in a SQL statement even though it is supposed to support that language.
