If you are into Web part development you probably have heard about the SmartPart. This generic Web part allows you to host any ASP.NET user control within your SharePoint sites. It allows for a designer-driven approach to developing Web parts instead of very code-intensive approach that is available out-of-the box with SharePoint. People who are not acquainted with it should have a look at the latest version (version 1.1) available as a community tool on www.smartpart.info. Jan and I also have written an article that will quickly get you up-to-speed with the SmartPart. The article is available on the MSDN Belux site over here.

Now, what’s next you might ask? Well, Jan has been working on a new version of the SmartPart, also referred to as ‘the son of the SmartPart’ by Mike Fitzmaurice. We have been working closely with the Microsoft SharePoint team to provide you with a brand new version of the SmartPart (version 2.0) that we and Microsoft understand will be enormously useful if you move your SharePoint sites onto the ASP.NET 2.0 framework by installing the forthcoming SP2 of WSS. Mike has a good posting on it over here. SP2 of WSS brings SharePoint developers for the first time onto the ASP.NET 2.0 platform but does not leverage yet the full Web part infrastructure that is provided by ASP.NET 2.0. This means that within your SP2 WSS sites, you will not be able to start utilizing directly the ASP.NET 2.0 Web parts or user controls. Now before you say ‘What a shame!’, do know that you will get full ASP.NET 2.0 support in the next version of SharePoint. More on this will be posted of course after the official sessions here at the PDC.

To bridge the gap, Microsoft asked us to come up with a new version of the SmartPart a couple of months ago. And we are proud to announce that today we have a PDC technology preview that will available on www.smartpart.info in the coming days. If you are here at the PDC, you will also hear about it in the sessions of Mike Ammerlaan when he talks about the next version of SharePoint and the options to use the full power of ASP.NET 2.0 in that version. Definitely a session that should interest all SharePoint geeks!

So, what are the features of this new SmartPart version? Actually, it is very simple. We are able now to host of ASP.NET 2.0 user controls and Web parts inside a WSS SP2 Web part and provide full support for custom properties, toolparts and of course the well-beloved connection infrastructure supported by WSS. So all the nice things you have for the SmartPart v1.1 are available for the SmartPart v2.0 but now on top of the ASP.NET 2.0 framework.

Basically, that is it, but if you know the powerful design-time support for ASP.NET 2.0 Web parts and user controls, you can imagine a lot of scenarios where this ASP.NET 2.0 power can be leveraged into your new WSS SP2 team sites.

We are currently working on some documentation for you to have a quickstart. A video tutorial and an article should appear very soon.

As community guys we hope we are helping you develop these compelling solutions on top of the SharePoint infrastructure. And the good news for us now is that the Microsoft SharePoint team is fully supporting our efforts which are of course a great motivation for us to continue our work.