Utility to Convert Text / HTML to a Visual Basic String
AJAX opens many interesting new doors in terms of how we can tailor the user experience to the customers needs and how we can display content based on any number of state context.
This sometimes means fetching and manipulating HTML or XML in our server side code and sending it to the browser as execution time via an AJAX request.
Earlier today I was "sprucing up" a demo on implementing the "Partial Page Update Pattern" in preparation for a talk on AJAX Patterns that I'm giving at AJAX World next week in New York.
I always try to minimize my demo application dependencies and isolate the concept that I'm talking about as much as possible and I wanted to return some markup to my web page and dynamically update the DOM, but I didn't want to add a file or database dependency so I decided to just store HTML in a VB string.
I wanted more than trivial markup and HTML is time consuming to convert to a programming friendly string, what with all those quotes and all.
I decided to write a little quickie utility to do string conversion of cut-and-paste HTML when a little searching produced a free utility to do just what I wanted.
It's great for testing, demos, or if you have a manual cut-and-paste editing process. (But don't REALLY store HTML in your source code !)
Try it out.