Chris Pels posted a great video tutorial of the ASP.net CSS Control Adapters on the asp.net site. If you’ve ever wanted to use the ASP.net 2.0 server controls for page elements like menus, tree views, gridviews, detailviews, etc.. but would like the ASP.net process to render semantic HTML then you’ll love this video and solution.

Here’s a little background. Last year my good friend Russ Helfand at GroovyBits and I worked on a CSS solution for Microsoft that makes ASP.net 2.0 server controls render semantically correct HTML and CSS. That is, I worked on the CSS styling and Russ did ALL the ASP.net code. I wouldn’t have known where to start with the server code.

The stock ASP.net menu server control (that creates 1 tier menus or multi tier drop down menus) uses tables to hold the menu items. But the same server control when used with the CSS Adapters will render clean nested ul and li tags. Enjoy.