For my blog, I use SyntaxHighlighter to format code snippets (which I believe to be the best code formatting solution out there for a few reasons). The problem is however that it requires you to wrap your code in <pre class="brush: c#"> your code goes here </pre> tags – which can be a pain.
The WMD Editor control (or the stackoverflow open source port) on the other hand has a convenient button for "code" (or using the Ctl-K hotkey) that will indent the snippet in such a way that when rendered by Markdown (whether in the WMD Editor’s preview pane with the server side MarkdownSharp for example) it will be wrapped in <pre><code>your code snippet</code></pre> tags.
This format won't be highlighted by SyntaxHighlighter by default however.
Without wanting to modify SyntaxHighlighter my solution to this was to use jQuery to transform all instances of:
<pre><code>code snippet</code></pre>
rendered on the page to:
<pre class="brush: c#">code snippet</pre>
After this has been done, SyntaxHighlighter will be able to format the code snippet as it usually would.
I’ve created the following jQuery snippet to do this (which also goes to demonstrate the power of jQuery):
//Find all <pre> tags that have a <code> tag child, and add the "brush: c#" class to the <pre> tag.
$('pre:has(code)').addClass('brush: c#');
//Find each <code> tag (with a <pre> parent), and replace it’s contents with itself leaving only the <pre> tag behind.
$('pre>code').each(function(index) {
var cnt = $(this).contents();
$(this).replaceWith(cnt);
});
The end result being you will have beautiful syntax highlighting or your code snippets with a simple click of the WMD Editor's 'code' button (or the Ctl-K hotkey).
If you wish to use another brush, you can still explicitly define a <pre> tag as normal specifying a different SyntaxHighlighter brush.
ASP.NET Wiki Control with Markdown
I am hosting an open source project that wraps the WMD Editor and MarkdownSharp projects together into a convenient wiki control over Linq to SQL that you can embed in any ASP.NET website (also with special instructions for installing into BlogEngine.NET for a better page editing solution).
I have just updated the latest version to include SyntaxHighlighter integration and will use javascript to detect for the presence of jQuery and SyntaxHighlighter and, if found, will run the jQuery code mentioned above to format your code snippets automatically through SyntaxHighlighter.
More information on the control can be found on the ASP.NET Wiki Control with Markdown download page.