Tatham Oddie

The video recording from Damian and my session at REMIX Sydney last week is now online. Thanks to some funky aspect ratio issues we both look really buff too.

In this session, two ASP.NET MVPs will share their experiences from building Australia’s largest e-commerce site with ASP.NET Web Forms. They’ll show you how to be a good web citizen by covering standards compliance (properly!), cross browser and accessibility considerations, non-JavaScript support, as well as coding techniques like the Model-View-Presenter pattern to improve maintainability and testing. Along the way, there’ll be plenty of discussion of the differences between Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC in each area, as well as an early peek at some of the new features coming in ASP.NET 4.0 and VS 2010.

Building great standards based websites for the big wide world with ASP.NET 4.0 – watch online

Building great standards based websites for the big wide world with ASP.NET 4.0 – download WMV

The resources from our talk are now all online (including the ones that hadn’t been released yet on the day):

• Damian’s ASP.NET Web Forms Model-View-Presenter (MVP) Framework (Open source under MS-PL)
• Damian’s Visual Studio XHTML 1.1 Templates (Open source under MIT)
• My XHTML Markup Sanitizer (Open source under MS-PL)

We also talked about the CSS Friendly Control Adapters which are again open source, under MS-PL.

While you’re checking out the videos, take a look at Jordan’s rockin’ Silverlight 3 Super Session. Not all of the videos are up yet (like, most of them aren’t), and I imagine that from the feedback flowing in there might be an updated version of the videos soon, so keep watching the videos page for some other really good content.

Updated @ 1601, 18th June: The video page interface has been updated to support deep linking so I’ve update this post to include links to the in-page players.

Updated @ 1053, 20th June: Added links to resources now that they’re all been published.

Last week at Remix I demonstrated a markup sanitizer that I’d been working on and announced that it’d soon be available as open source. After a few days and a bit of intellectual property management, I’ve finally managed to get it up on CodePlex under the MS-PL license.

http://markupsanitizer.codeplex.com

The XHTML Markup Sanitizer takes untrusted (X)HTML and massages it into real, trusted XHTML. While plenty of effort goes into preserving the original intent, markup validity and safety is the first priority. It’s particularly useful with content management systems where users are in control of markup, but you want to target XHTML1.1.

The sanitizer does not process entire pages. It is designed to massage snippets of text that users might enter in things like blog comments or product descriptions.

Check it out and try it in your project today! Now you have no excuse for not targeting full standards compliance.

http://opensearchvalidator.com

I’ve been doing a lot of work with both OpenSearch and IE8 Visual Search this week. These are the feeds to let you integrate your website into the browser’s search dropdown. Unfortunately the specs are spread across three different organisations (A9, Mozilla and Microsoft) and all rather poorly documented.

We’ve been implementing the feeds on a major e-commerce website, and thus we wanted to make sure we got them right. (We’ll be showing the site in the REMIX keynote next week.)

The solution? I built a validator. As we found new issues, I added them to the validator.

Today I’m releasing that validator for you to test your own sites with.

Some cool ones to check out are:

• hanselman.com, who has his SearchFrom element in the wrong namespace at the time of writing
• wikipedia.org, who are serving their visual search suggestions with the wrong media type at the time of writing
• au.yahoo.com, who are serving their OpenSearch description with the wrong media type at the time of writing
• bing.com, who don’t even publish a feed at the time of writing

Update 7th June 2009: The source code is now published on CodePlex.