User Control Container Web Part

I found a great tip and component that strangely enough has been around for a couple of months. Fons Sonnemans over at Reflection IT created a nice simple SharePoint Web Part that acts like a container for normal ASP.NET User Controls (.ascx files). This makes it dead simple to customize a portal page by adding normal ASP.NET controls to it.

You simply deploy the web part into your SharePoint environment and then create a custom control (his example uses a simple calculator). Deploy the user control to your web server (not sure if it has to be the SharePoint server) and then specify it in the wrapper web part. Presto. Instant Web Part without having to do all that funky Render code. Very nice.

There's an updated version of the component here. You can find the original information and v1.0 of the web part here.