I've been meaning to blog about this for some time, ever since I went to the first MS Office Dev Con in Redmond but just haven't had the time. Well what can I say? ASP.NET 2.0 web parts are great, I've used them and I love them. The whole ease of use is basically whats got me hooked on them, gone are the long laborious tasks of creating webparts the old fashioned way and making sure your neatly typed HTML strings will render, but only after you have compiled your code and dragged it into the GAC to test it. Only to find you left a tag off somewhere and have to start all over again!
I suppose anyone who has used them will testify to their ease of use, using the new version of Visual Studio development is just a case of drag and dropping webpart zones onto your page and then dragging usercontrols into those zone. Yes you read that correctly you can drag usercontrols into webpart zone and they automatically pick up the style and chrome of the webpart zone which you can configure within Visual Studio. Communicating between webparts has also been made easier with common interfaces for this you can now set public methods in your usercontrols to communicate between webparts. However how user controls are referenced in .NET 2.0 has changed slightly and I hope to cover more of this in another blog posting.
From the Office Devcon I gathered that the reason for the shift of webparts into ASP.NET is that the ASP.NET team really like the idea and thats why they included them. It also appeared that the new version of Sharepoint would also adopt this method (how this will all gel together I am still not sure). The message appeared that you should still develop webparts the traditional way for SharePoint and when the next version comes out they "should" be able to migrate to the newer version. One of the questions raised was "Well what does SharePoint do now that you can get webparts in ASP.NET?" The reply was generally that, Sharepoint is a "great collaborative product" that still gives you a collaborative team experience with document management/storage ability, alerts, navigation etc. It all makes me wonder if the nature of Sharepoint will change having heard rumours of a possible merging of Sharepoint with another of Microsoft’s popular products, they may give it even greater functionality