In my second post in the series of ripping off other peoples work :-) here’s an updated version of David Anson’s HtmlTextBlock control back from 2007.

This was originally written based on the TextBlock control, but since the TextBlock control was sealed and couldn’t be inherited from, it required a lot of copying properties around. Textblocks also only supports text, so the HyperLink method was not really a hyperlink, and there was no image support, but from what we had available back them, it was a really good solution considering the simplicity (I like simple small implementations).

Since then Silverlight 4 has arrived, and we now have the RichTextBlock control. This supports hyperlinks, images etc, and it is not sealed, so we can pretty easily get around the limitations that the original implementation had. Most of the logic for generating the HTML is the same, but now with proper support for images and real hyperlinks. Again all the credit goes to the original author. I just did some tweaks.

You can download the source with a sample app here: HtmlTextBlock.zip (34.15 kb)

UPDATE: Rewrote the parser approach quite a lot. Now it also supports tables (!) as well as setting fontsize using the H1..H4 tags. With the new parser approach it should be easier to add support for other more complex tags as well.

You can download the source with a sample app here: HtmlTextBlock_v2.zip (34.15 kb)