Over the past while (mostly but not entirely in my spare time), I've been working on creating a web-based input control.  This control behaves like a standard INPUT or TEXTAREA control would except that it allows for custom formattings (e.g. bolding, italicizing, indending text, etc) and what not.  You may already be familiar with some controls out there that do pretty much the same thing (such as FreeTextBox, et al).  While these controls are all fine and dandy, and no doubt their authors put in lots of time to get them to work properly, I couldn't bring myself to use them for a variety of reasons: 1) I don't usually like to use 3rd party components and 2) they didn't offer all the functionality that I desired in the control.

I've pretty much completed the control; I've finished it enough at least for version 1.0.  I have a lot of additional bits of functionality that I strongly desire to get into the control in a version 2.0 timeframe, but for the time being, I'll have to let it suffice as is.  The UI is pretty much nailed down as demonstrated in these screen shots.  I might make some very very minor tweaks here before I actually release the code, but it's pretty much frozen.  In a future article I'll go into the technical aspects of the control and how it was written and how I accomplished the various aspects of its design and development.

Each and every aspect of this control is customizable: from the buttons, to their appearance (image, or image/text), the dropdown menus, the emoticons, everything.  And it's all done via markup in your .ASPX page so it makes it very nice to display and code.

Let me know what you think!