I submitted a proposal for the VS TechEd 2005 presentation but like many others I received yesterday the email that I will not be invited. Too bad, I will try again for the European TechEd 2005. The presentation I submitted was an overview of the smart part and the smarter way of building Web parts.

Today, an article written by Jan and myself has been released on MSDN Belux. The article gives you an overview of the basic steps of using the smart part. If you have been playing with it already, you will not be too excited about the content. If you are new, this can be your first experience :-).

Here is the abstract:

Building web parts is one of the main extensibility points when you work within a Windows SharePoint Services environment. The development steps of building SharePoint web parts is well-documented in books, in the Windows SharePoint Services SDK and in a whole set of articles, tutorials and walkthroughs available from the SharePoint community or from Microsoft directly itself. One of the major disadvantages of following the traditional web part development steps is that building web parts this way requires extensive coding with respect to the UI you want to provide within the web part. At the time of writing, there is no designer available for developers to create the body of a web part in a very WYSIWYG manner.

This article describes another approach to building SharePoint web parts. The approach consists of making use of ASP.NET user controls to make up the body of the SharePoint web part. The technique leads to a dramatic increase in the productivity of anybody creating web parts. The article ‘Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part II : Web Parts and User Controls’ published here on the Belux MSDN site last year describes the basic steps. The idea of using ASP.NET user controls in web part development received a lot of adoption in the SharePoint community and has evolved in a generic framework called the SmartPart. In this article we will highlight what the SmartPart is and how to use it when involved in SharePoint web part development.

Full article here!