Add Web Parts to Your Application

Building Web Parts, Part 1
by Wei-Meng Lee, author of ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook
05/23/2005


Websites today contain a wealth of information; so much that a poorly designed site can easily overwhelm users. To better help users cope, portal websites today (such as MSN) often organize their data into discrete units that support a degree of personalization. Information is organized into standalone parts, and users can rearrange those parts to suit their individual working styles. Such personalization also lets users hide the parts that contain information in which they have no interest. What's more, users can save their settings so that the site will remember their preferences the next time they visit the site. In ASP.NET 2.0, you can now build web portals that offer this kind of modularization of information and personalization using the new Web Parts framework.

Essentially, the Web Parts framework contains a set of controls that lets you organize a portal page in a way that allows users of the portal to customize the appearance, content, and behavior of its contents directly from a web browser. The changes are then saved for the user and recalled for subsequent visits. All of this functionality can be implemented without the need for much coding.

http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2005/05/23/webparts_1.html