UPDATE #2: These are about to go back online, version Beta 1.1 (last update 4/29/2006) -- thanks for your patience.  If you downloaded the Beta 1 verison (4/27/2006) please be sure to get the new version and only use the bits from that.  Enjoy and sorry for the inconvenience/teaser :)

 

UPDATE: We are experiecing some issues with this on our end and we will be working through them over the weekend.  Expect the site to be available again on Monday or Tuesday -- I'll Update the blog post.

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ScottGu mentioned this earlier in the month, but I’m happy to announce that this is now live at http://www.asp.net/cssadapters/.  The CSS Friendly Adapters are a set of sample adapters, documentations, and a sample Web site that show how to take advantage of the ASP.NET 2.0 control adapter architecture to control the rendering output of controls.

   

One of the biggest pieces of feedback that we have heard about some ASP.NET 2.0 controls is that they render markup that is often difficult to style with CSS.  These sample adapters (TreeView, Menu, DataList, FormView, DetailsView) show how to take advantage of the extensibility architecture of controls and customize the output to be more “CSS friendly.”  

   

For example - -the menu control by default renders a complex set of tables and spans to create itself.  In a perfect world it would render a set of <UL> and <LI> tags that would be styled and controlled through CSS.  The menu control adapter accomplishes this.  Each of the other samples improves the CSS friendliness of the control rendering in similar amazing ways.

 
In addition to the adapters and a fully functional sample Web site that consumes them, the kit has a detailed whitepaper that explains the philosophy behind these specific adapters, and provides deep insight into how the adapter architecture works which will make it much easier for you to customize these existing adapters (if they don’t meet your needs as is) and create your own for other controls.    

The kit is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL) meaning you can do whatever you want with them, create derivative works, productize, include in packaged apps, create a community around them to build even more adapters, you name it!  It is incredibly ‘permissive’ J    

This has been a pet project of mine for the better part of 3 months so I am particularly excited to get the Beta out the door.  We want to get your feedback, your bugs, and your comments so that we can incorporate them into the final release of the sample.    

So let me know what you think, post in the forum at: http://forums.asp.net/1018/ShowForum.aspx    

Oh and if you are using IE7B2 we are very aware of a major rendering issue with the view-source function of the hosted and sample site.  This is a known IE7B2 bug and it will be fixed in a future release of IE7 (they tell us for Beta 3 for sure!)…    

Enjoy!