Web Parts and Visual Studio

While the overall structure of a portal framework page is not that difficult to grasp, the multiple nested layers of style elements and zone templates, and the Web Parts themselves declared within content templates, do make it quite taxing to create pages from scratch. However, as you'd expect, the new version of Visual Studio makes it all much easier.

Figure 8.15 on the next page shows some of the example page you saw earlier loaded into an early version of Visual Studio. You can see that the WebPartManager allows you to switch the page mode on demand so that you see how the page will look in each mode. It also contains all the relevant controls in the Toolbox on the left, allowing you to drag them onto a page as required and simply set the properties in the lower right-hand section of the window.

Figure 8.15. Building a Web Parts page in Visual Studio