SmartPart is rattling the MSFT Sharpoint cage

Patrick asks why Microsoft is silent on the SmartPart approach to webpart development. He gets response from Mike Fitzmaurice and Mike gets flamed in comments for beeing egocentric and authoritative. Daniel gets in the race and shows support for the smartest of parts.. In other words the heat is on!

I've been asked by customers, the community and colleagues on my opinion on webpart development for a while. Recently we were doing a presentation on the subject and I feel one of the foils fits pretty good in this discussion.

The message we convey to our customers and the community is that the "MSDN"-way of coding webparts is a completely masochistic act. As the illustration shows, the simple stuff is done by using frontpage or standard sharepoint customization (often with a bit of re-thinking and compromize). The SmartPart is the ideal choice for any webpart development not targeted for mass distribution like webparts for SAP, Notes or MS Project.

Most of the time webparts are developed for a one-time affair and its obviously bloated to write your own render method. Nuff said about that.

I'd like to turn this discussion a bit. I think the root of this is a growing Sharepoint developers community which are shown little to no real support from MSFT. Recently Steve Ballmer stated that Sharepoint is Microsofts number ONE product [through Mike] yet there are no public product roadmap, Longhorn has got a cooler developer center at MSDN, and the only developer goodies we get are through bloggers like Daniel.

Face it. People like Jan, Patrick, Kris, Mike, Maxim, Bob, Tariq, Erol and the rest of the growing Sharepoint community has contributed in a major fashion the past year. When I visited TechEd this year in Amsterdam I searched high and low for interesting Sharepoint sessions or officials, ending up with a rather "so-last-year" session with Fitz (meaning that it was kinda low-level compared to what the community was doing at the time).

Create the arena Microsoft. We're already playing.