One of the things that came out of Markdown, One Year Later was that we really needed to open source our C# server-side implementation of Markdown. While the client side implementation of Markdown is already open sourced, there are two sides to the Markdown story on Stack Overflow — what appears in the Javascript preview…

One of the things that came out of Markdown, One Year Later was that we really needed to open source our C# server-side implementation of Markdown.

While the client side implementation of Markdown is already open sourced, there are two sides to the Markdown story on Stack Overflow — what appears in the Javascript preview on the client, and what is rendered in C# on the server and ultimately stored in the database. While we are trying to normalize the client and server implementation over time — I’ve made significant progress in the last two weeks in doing so — there are inevitably small differences that creep in over time. It would be nice to have more eyeballs on this process to assist.

Since the original C# library we used for Markdown was not open source, this was a problem. I mailed the author, Milan Negovan, and he granted copyright to me.

Hi there, guys! Sure, I don’t mind at all. I’ve always wanted the community to improve and contribute to its development, but never found the proverbial bandwidth to run the project that way. Cheers!

Milan

So, I’ve released our C# implementation of Markdown under a proper open source license — as MarkdownSharp!

http://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/

I’ve already made a few changes to properly package it as a decent open source project:

included relevant links, documentation, and related files

added MDTest 1.1 test suite

added Simple test suite

both NUnit and console runnable tests

standard Benchmark with short, medium, and long Markdown samples

refactored and profiled for 2x – 5x more performance

the Stack Overflow specific changes (such as stricter italics/bold) are configurable, so you can toggle them on and off.

One nice side effect of this process is that I’ve been able to incorporate quite a few bug fixes, some of them fairly serious. The failure to escape backticks was a big one, and there was a subtle bug involving a single character of whitespace that caused all <hr/> s to be wrapped in paragraph tags since.. well, forever.

Anyway, take a look at the project, feel free to browse the source, and please contribute whatever you can to make it better for everyone.