Everything seems to be working so far.

It covers the basics, required, regex, length etc. But I wanted a rule to determine the length of a string provided by a WYSIWYG editor. The WYSIWYG will have extra whitespace characters and HTML which need to be stripped.

This is what I came up with to solve this problem, there may be an easier way. (This needs an implemented StripHtml extension method to work.)

public class RequiredHtml: ValidationAttribute
{
  private int maxLength = int.MaxValue;
  private int minLength;

  public int MinLength
  {
    get { return minLength; }
    set { minLength = value; }
  }

  public int MaxLength
  {
    get { return maxLength; }
    set { maxLength = value; }
  }

  public override bool IsValid( object value )
  {
    if ( value == null )
      return false;

    var strLength = value.ToString().StripHtml().Trim().Length;
    return strLength >= minLength && strLength <= maxLength;
  }
}

I've been revisiting this awesome game over the last week. I picked it up in the steam Christmas sale for £3.25, a total bargain for a game this good. I do have the Collectors Edition already on the Xbox 360 as it wasn't originally released for the PC but I have the PC version of Mass Effect 2 and will be getting Mass Effect 3 on PC too and I intend to go through all 3 of them with this save.

Unfortunately you can tell that it wasn't originally released for PC, it can be quite unstable and doesn't respond well to alt + tab. Other than a few minor issues and the odd crash its an absolutely amazing game and has been improved in many areas compared to the original release and I'm very much looking forward to Mass Effect 3 and picking up Mass Effect: Retribution in the next few days.

Easily a 10/10.

So I wrote a quick prototype that will generate this html in a nice and readable way.

<div id="idtest" class="test">
    <p>This is a paragraph<a href="/test.html">Link 1</a></p>
    <p>Paragraph 2<a href="/test2.html">Link 2</a></p>
</div>
<div>
    <ul class="list">
        <li>Test</li>
        <li>Test 2</li>
    </ul>
    <p>Test!</p>
</div>

You can see the actual code here.  So with this code this html can be generated like this;

<script type="text/javascript">
    alert(
        html()
            .div({ className: 'test', id: 'idtest' })
                .add(function(){
                    this.p('This is a paragraph')
                        .a({href: '/test.html', text: 'Link 1'});
                    this.p('Paragraph 2')
                        .a({href: '/test2.html', text: 'Link 2'});
                })
            .div().ul({className:'list'})
                 .add(function() {
                    this.li("Test");
                    this.li("Test 2");
            })
            .p("Test!")
    );
</script>

How it works

Chained methods append the following element to the previous element.  And the add method will add all sub elements as children of the element that add was called on.

So html.div() will return <div></div>, html.div().p(“test”) will give you <div><p>test</p></div> and html.div().add(function() { this.p(); this.p(); }) will give <div><p></p><p></p></div>.

This works by creating a document fragment and  building up the html structure in the fragment rather than concatenating strings to produce the html. The toString method then returns the innerHTML.

It’s also my first entry using Windows Live Writer. I’m using the sample service from Scott Hanselmans blog which lets me publish html into a folder on my laptop using a service running on IIS Express.

After using Live Writer a few times now, mostly to write blogs articles at work, I think I want to integrate it fully with my website. It definitely beats the web based WYSIWYG editors out there.

I’ve been preoccupied with a couple of games lately so the latest updates to this site haven’t been finished yet. There are some in progress though.

I’ve also moved all of my email over to Google Apps Standard. The Google Apps service is fantastic.

I've cut down on the number of pages and the default page is no longer the blog. I've also opted for Flickr integration rather than managing my own image gallery and removed a lot of other pointless features. I also have much better searching from NHibernate search.

Still to come; Blog comments with Facebook integration.