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The main thing I've been working on for the upcoming MonoDevelop 2.0 release is ASP.NET code completion, and I'm pretty happy with its current state. Recently I've been "downporting" this code into base classes to make it easier to write XML completion and HTML completion editor extensions. A while back I wrote a hybrid XML/ASP.NET/HTML parser, which I've been using in MonoDevelop for triggering ASP.NET code completion. The aims of this parser were to be extensible and to have good error recovery. This makes sharing code between XML-like completion extensions very easy — the completion triggering code and the path bar code are entirely shared between the editors.

After moving the HTML code down to a common base class, I decided to expose this functionality for actual HTML files, rather than just ASP.NET, and wrote an HTML text editor extension to handle this.

Now that MonoDevelop 1.0 is on the verge of shipping, I have begun to plan the parser that will underpin the ASP.NET code completion and visual designer in upcoming versions of MonoDevelop. During a discussion with our ASP.NET expert Marek, I found out about an obscure ASP.NET feature that currently causes problems for Mono's ASP.NET parser, and is entirely counterintuitive to anyone with any XML knowledge.

Finally, someone found a clean way to do three-column fluid layout with XHTML and CSS. This solves just about every three-column layout problem I've ever had. It fixes the visual elements, keeping the footer at the bottom of the page no matter which column is the tallest, and resizing without the elements running into each other.

The visual side of this has been done before – especially with tables! – but what is most important about this version is that is using clean XHTML, with no extra non-semantic markup needed, though one div tag can be added for increased browser compatibility. What's more, it allows a good struture: when it's unstyled, it displays the heading and content before the navigation. This makes things easier for people with screen readers and older browsers.