Announcing the ASP.Net Control Adapters, a new open source project

Over the past few weeks, I started doing some experimentation with a different approach to changing the rendering of default ASP.Net controls. For a few years, I (and many others) have used the CSSFriendly project for this. That project does some nice things, but has many shortcomings.

I hemmed and hawed about this a bit (see Rewriting the ASP.Net CSS Friendly Adapters – does anyone care?), but in the end some fundamental interest — and the underlying popularity of the CSSFriendly project (consistently in the top-20 downloads on CodePlex) made me decide to go ahead with it.

So, I am proud to announce a new open source project: the ASP.Net Control Adapters!

The project site is hosted through Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/aspnetcontroladapters/

I have checked in my original test/experimentation code, cleaned up a bit to make it more useful. It implements limited support for the CheckBoxList control. Source code includes the main project, a UnitTests project (using NUnit), a WebTests project (a web app that invokes the adapted control in a web page), license/readme files, and an NAnt build script.

I also started working on a documentation format, which you can see at http://code.google.com/p/aspnetcontroladapters/wiki/CheckBoxList.

There’s still a lot missing in terms of implementation (not even postback support yet!), and unit testing, but in general the programmers out there should be able to understand the approach I’m taking, and designers/front-end developers can understand the GUI approach.

Still lots to do before this is consumable by others, but I wanted to get this up and hosted.

Also — there’s a Google Group for it: http://groups.google.com/group/aspnetcontroladapters — be sure to head there to add to the discussion.