A small but noteable design change to the ASP.NET Portal Framework
In ASP.NET V2 the new portal framework looks very interesting. It seems
to me that this framework will lend itself very nicely for building applications
which allow for a plug-in style of architecture and therefore make re-use of
componentize UI widgets much more prominent.
The portal framework itself is very large and I'm really only just starting
to wade through it in-depth. One interesting change that is coming through
from earlier builds of ASP.NET V2 is that they are doing away with the
WebPartPageMenu control. The WebPartPageMenu control was responsible for
automagically displaying a list of options for switching in and out of design
mode when you want to be able to design the layout of web parts at
runtime. You can see how that was previously implemented in this code
snippet:
http://beta.asp.net/quickstart/util/srcview.aspx?path=/quickstart/aspnet/samples/webparts/intro/webparts.src
Look specifically at the following tag:
<asp:WebPartPageMenu ID="WebPartPageMenu1"
Runat="server"/>
Because this control no longer exists you need to create your own UI
controls to perform that action and add code to handle the context switch.
Like so...
if(this.Button1.Text == "Design")
{
WebPartManager1.DisplayMode = WebPartManager.DesignDisplayMode;
this.Button1.Text = "Exit Design Mode";
}
else
{
WebPartManager1.DisplayMode = WebPartManager.BrowseDisplayMode;
this.Button1.Text = "Design";
}
You can read about other design changes targetted for Beta 2 here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/ShankuN/archive/2004/08/16/215487.aspx