Essential SharePoint 2007: A Practical Guide for Users, Administrators and Developers

Chapter 8. Creating Web Parts

Web parts are based on ASP.NET web controls, but are otherwise fairly new. For that reason, the development tools for web parts are scattered across a number of different downloads. That makes developing web parts more confusing than it really should be. I try to address this problem by breaking my discussion of web parts into two chapters:

• This chapter covers setting up your development environment to make writing, debugging, and deploying web parts as easy as possible.

• Chapter 9 covers writing code to perform useful tasks in those web parts.

You can develop web parts in Visual Basic .NET or Visual C#. Both chapters show sample code in Visual Basic .NET because that is currently the most popular language. Equivalent Visual C# samples are available at http://usingsharepoint.com/samples/Ch08CS.aspx and Ch09CS.aspx .