Building Web Parts the Smart Way: Starting with the SharePoint SmartPart

Microsoft Belgie & Luxemburg - MSDN - Building Web Parts the Smart Way: Starting with the SharePoint SmartPart

"Building web parts is one of the main extensibility points when you work within a Windows SharePoint Services environment. The development steps of building SharePoint web parts is well-documented in books, in the Windows SharePoint Services SDK and in a whole set of articles, tutorials and walkthroughs available from the SharePoint community or from Microsoft directly itself. One of the major disadvantages of following the traditional web part development steps is that building web parts this way requires extensive coding with respect to the UI you want to provide within the web part. At the time of writing, there is no designer available for developers to create the body of a web part in a very WYSIWYG manner.

This article describes another approach to building SharePoint web parts. The approach consists of making use of ASP.NET user controls to make up the body of the SharePoint web part. The technique leads to a dramatic increase in the productivity of anybody creating web parts. The article 'Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part II : Web Parts and User Controls' published here on the Belux MSDN site last year describes the basic steps. The idea of using ASP.NET user controls in web part development received a lot of adoption in the SharePoint community and has evolved in a generic framework called the SmartPart. In this article we will highlight what the SmartPart is and how to use it when involved in SharePoint web part development. ..."

A very nice article on creating SharePoint web parts using the very cool SmartPart.

This article is a start to finish tutorial. Starting with a little info about the SmartPart,downloading,installing, using and then all the way through creating your own Web Part with it...

One thing that I found is that the URL in the article to download the SmartPart doesn't seem to point to the right place. Here's a working URL,
GotDotNet: SmartPart for SharePoint: Home