Lightbox JS (and Lightbox JS 2.0, the most recent and even more impressive incarnation) allows you to display large images in a web page without sacrificing real estate. Go give it a try to see what I’m talking about — it’ll be much easier to understand than an additional paragraph of my ramblings.

I thought the Lightbox capabilities would be a nice touch to an ASP.NET application I’m currently working on, so I set about trying to make a full-blown custom web control so I could just drag a Lightbox onto a page during design-time instead of mucking about in script. The end result was…satisfactory. I had a custom control that inherited from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl and could be sized and styled and dealt with all the Lightbox JS-related items (scripts, stylesheets, images) as Embedded Resources.

But it still seemed clunky. So I was quite happy to stumble across Lightbox.NET, a very similar control developed by Javier G. Lozano. You can find the source as well as additional comments about the differences between the two approaches here.

Update (7/10/07): Fixed URLs. Additionally, Lightbox.NET is now a project at CodePlex and may be found here.

FCKeditor utilized ieSpell and Speller Pages; the former being an installable, Internet-Explorer only spellchecker and the latter being a PHP-based option. ieSpell was right out: although our client uses IE 6 exclusively, there was no guarantee that they would continue to do so throughout the life of the project…as a result we were using Firefox 1.5 as a sanity check to avoid future headaches (either due to a full switch to another browser or the compatibility issues that IE 7 threatens to bring). If that weren't enough, our client's systems are locked down so much that it would be unlikely that ieSpell could be easily installed on users' machines.

FreeTextBox also used ieSpell in addition to NetSpell, which is an Open Source .NET project. Hey, this was perfect! Drag, drop, fire and forget!

Well, not exactly. NetSpell isn't included with the FTB distribution and it doesn't recognize the DLL if you just drop it into /Bin, no matter how nicely you ask. FreeTextBox's advantage over FCKeditor evaporated.

Both editors have pretty anemic documentation — to use a map analogy it's good enough to get you from home to the grocery store and back, but you're completely screwed if you're also trying to go to the library…let alone if you wanted to take a shortcut through a park or two. I realize that this is to be expected for most Open Source projects, but it's a little disheartening to see FreeTextBox suffer from it as well…and in fact FCKeditor had better documentation in this case though its wiki is in dire need of some work.

I decided to take a look at the online demos of both widgets. No dice: FCKeditor doesn't even enable the spell check button, and FreeTextBox displays a "NetSpell libraries not properly linked" alertbox. Gee, thanks.

That left only one option: wading through forums. Ugh. Your mileage may vary, but more often than not I feel dumber and angrier after going through support forums…usually after running across a half-dozen or so posts like this:

I'm having trouble trying to get X to do Y and I'm getting error Z. Help!

Ok, that in itself isn't too bad…I usually come across these posts because I'm getting error Z. What causes my head to explode are the follow-ups by the original poster that inevitably look like this:

Never mind, I figured it out.

…with no further details. Every fiber of my being craves the ability to inflict pain upon such morons (or Help Vampires, to use the scientific term).

But I digress. After unsuccessfully surfing through the FCKeditor forums at SourceForge (which are abysmal by default since there's no way to search for a topic) and the FreeTextBox forums, I came across this post by Drone where all was revealed. Well, enough was revealed for my purposes at least. Drone is my hero, even if he doesn't know it.

As a result, I was able to get FreeTextBox up and running on our development website. That is, until another cryptic error cropped up today. A FTB developer responded and said it would be fixed in Monday's release…unfortunately it's now Thursday. I'm hoping that he's just swamped and the solution is forthcoming, because at this point it would really suck to switch to FCKeditor. Stay tuned, I guess.