Chapter 13. Web Parts and Gadgets

Using Ajax can help you make web applications behave more like desktop applications. The more desktop-like applications become, the more developers tend to think about how to use components to deliver functionality to their pages and how to reuse this functionality once they've created it.

Atlas offers several ways to reuse components to add functionality to browser-based clients. The control extenders discussed in Chapter 1 are a prime example. Web Parts and Windows Live Gadgets are two others.

This chapter first covers Web Parts: an ASP.NET feature introduced in ASP.NET 2.0, which gets some extra spice thanks to Atlas. It then discusses implementing so-called Gadgets for the Microsoft portal Live.com, which shows you how to embed custom Atlas components on the new Microsoft portal and make them available for other users, as well.