JoelPadot.com

SmartPart for SharePoint

Recently, was charged with the not so awesome task of
writing an interface for a planning group to use to relate budget performance
measures with a separate more detailed model that breaks the measures into core
services. Nonetheless, sounds simple and
it is. The only thing that makes this
worth bringing up is that the one and only requirement was that it must be
presented in SharePoint. No problem! Right?

One of the biggest things SharePoint 2007 promises is that
all your current ASP.Net coding skills are immediately transferable to use with
SharePoint since it’s built on the .Net 2.0 Framework. Is this true? As it turns out… Yes.

So what did I do? I
used a web user control. I basically
created a web part that loads a single web user control and did all my work in
the web user control. Is this the right
or the best way to accomplish the task?
Probably not, BUT! It certainly
was the easiest.

One awesome thing I discovered from the whole experience was
the SmartPart template. The SmartPart
for SharePoint is a web part template project for Visual Studio available on CodePlex. I’ve used this in Visual Studio 2005 and
2008. Best of all, its free to use under their shared-source license.