Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

For the 'Tell.Me' explanation part of the about2findout.com project, I needed a web-based simple HTML editor. Visual Studio does not ship with such a component, but there are two popular freely available components you can use: FreeTextBox or FckEditor. Both are lightweight, cross-browser and good.

FreeTextBox is a pure asp.net component, written in C#. Inspite of the name, FreeTextBox comes in a (limited) free version and a full paying version. Also the source code has to be purchased, but the fees are small. You pay 50$ for a professional and 200$ for a source code license. FckEditor is a true open source project, and not exclusive to the .NET environment.

In the end I have chosen FreeTextBox because of one thing: its integration with the NetSpell spelling checker component that I already use in my project. I made the spelling screen multilingual, and manually set the language to check, but otherwise just plugged in the component as such and it works quite well.

The downside with including an HTML editor to your page is that you have to configure validateRequest="false" in the @Page directive af the .aspx file to prevent the build-in ASP.NET security checker to block the postback. It makes the page less secure, so be sure to manually delete all scripting tags or other unwanted tags from the HTML editor before storing it in your database.

Labels: asp.net, fckeditor, freetextbox