Writing SharePoint Web Parts, the painful adventure...

Writing Web Parts for SharePoint is an adventure. The type of adventure that you find yourself in the middle of, realize that you don't have your fedora cap and whip, and the boulder starts rushing towards you and the spiders are crawling all over you with no exit in sight. Not a very pleasant experience for anyone.

Luckily there are some saviors to this story. I've blogged about this before but after a weekend of writing custom web parts the painful way, I've basically given up on the Microsoft way for now and focused on using an alternative. Until VS 2005 comes along, where writing Web Parts is much easier, there is an interim solution. Fons Sonnemans and Jan Tielens got together and put together SmartPart. It's a great little addition to your SharePoint development toolbox and one everyone should have. Don't bother writing Web Parts and going through the 42 steps that Microsoft wants you to in order to get your web part created (although the Web Part Templates does make this easier). Just create a custom user control and drop it into a folder on your SharePoint server. SmartPart will happily render it for you, taking care of all the SharePoint stuff for you. The best part of this (besides not having to jump through hoops built Web Parts) is the fact that you can use the full UI design mode tools in Visual Studio to build your controls. No more RenderWebPart calls with hand building controls. Since your control is running on the SharePoint server, you can easily interface with the object model and do whatever you normally would do like accessing lists and sites and users oh my.

Anyways, check out the GotDotNet workspace here and give it a whirl. Beats the heck out of the fugly way of doing it today.