Chapter 6. Web Parts


6. Web Parts

WEB-BASED PORTAL APPLICATIONS have become a popular platform for all types of products, ranging from Intranet sites used internally at a company to popular Internet sites supporting millions of users. Microsoft made great strides in adding a scalable portal framework to the Windows Server 2003 platform when they released Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) in September of 2003. WSS provides the basic elements required by a portal framework by including support for site membership, content and document management, and the modular presentation of data through the use of Web Parts.

Web Parts provide WSS with its foundation for both customization and personalization. A user with the proper permissions can easily customize a page in a WSS site using a browser by adding, reconfiguring, and removing Web Parts. Customization changes will be seen by all site members. Individual site members can further personalize pages by adding, reconfiguring, and removing Web Parts. Developing custom Web Parts has provided an easy and powerful way to extend WSS sites. When you create a custom Web Part for WSS in which you want support for customization and personalization, you simply add properties to your Web Part class and apply a few special attributes. What's nice is that the Web Part infrastructure of WSS manages all of the details of serializing, storing, and retrieving the data associated with site customization and member personalization.

ASP.NET 2.0 introduces a Web Part infrastructure that is similar yet distinct from that of WSS. The new Web Part infrastructure of ASP.NET 2.0 is similar to WSS in the sense that it was designed to deal with the serialization, storage, and retrieval of customization and personalization data behind the scenes. It's different and far more flexible in that it's not tightly coupled to either SQL Server or Active Directory. That's great news for companies that want to build portal applications using Forms-based authentication and non-Microsoft DBMSs such as Oracle and DB2. The next release of WSS, SharePoint 2007, is based on the ASP.NET 2.0 infrastructure as well, so going forward, all portal development on Microsoft platforms will be based on the technology presented in this chapter.




Essential ASP. NET 2.0
Essential ASP.NET 2.0
ISBN: 0321237706
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 104

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net