December 2, 2003

FreeTextBox Rocks!

Because of history and laziness, my blog entries come from an HTML form on my site and they’ve always been in plain text. Well, today I got tired of that, so I asked Kent Sharkey (the MSDN King of ASP.NET) what I should get. He recommended the FreeTextBox ASP.NET control and this thing rocks! The Word/FrontPage keystrokes work the way I want them to. The Styles and Fonts and Colors are all provided for in an Office 2003-like toolbar. There’s a spell-checker (that installs on the fly, no less!), raw HTML editing, a table editor and a function that cleans up Word-produced HTML better than FrontPage! Plus it only took me about 30 minutes to get the thing going from a standing start and that included moving a form to use post-back so that I could enable runat=server. The only things I haven’t figured out how to make it do are disable some of the toolbar items, allow tab to take me out of the editor to other controls on my form and set the target on a link, but still, not bad for 30 minutes. : )

Highly Recommended.