MOSS 2007 Development

For all those, who would love to use their knowledge of .NET user control development in MOSS 2007 instead of the web parts:

First of all, web part development though native in web parts is cumbersome to write, and involves additional learning of the web part development. Well, with MOSS 2007 (I love the way they made it seamlessly integrate with ASP.NET) you can use the .NET User controls you have learned to write. First of all, with user controls the developers have the drag-drop feature for the UI development and that spares the nightmare of writing those writer.writeline ("")... That saves a lifetime!

How to use the User Controls - Just the same way MOSS 2007 itself uses!

The web.config of your MOSS 2007 web application has this line:



And browsing through the virtualized folder _controltemplates, you will find all the user controls that MOSS 2007 uses.

So, go ahead and create a new virtual directory under your web application, and point it to a directory under the root directory of your web application. and store all your user controls.

Including them in your web application will involve adding an entry into the web.config similar to the above (that's case sensitive - so be sure to type it in the same case), and add your Register directive to the page in the Sharepoint designer.

And your user control works perfectly the way as your web part!