Reflection IT Blog

Together with Jan Tielens, I have created a improved version of my User Control Container Web Part called the SmartPart for SharePoint.

Jan has written an introduction and even created a video demonstrating it in action.

We have created a GotDotNet Workspace for the SmartPart. Over there you can download an installation package that will install the SmartPart, the source code and an example user control. At this point there isn’t very much documentation, but I will work on that. :-) There are a lot of cool ideas which (I hope) will be added to the SmartPart (for example a connectable SmartPart). I’ve IM-ed with Patrick today and he has another cool idea which he discussed in one of his latest posts: using the User Interface Process block together with web parts. Anyway, some nice ideas are waiting to be implemented!

SharePoint is a great product. In this article I will demonstrate this by creating a Web Part which acts like a container for normal ASP.NET User Controls (.ascx files). This makes it very easy to customize a portal page by adding normal ASP.NET User Controls to it.