While on the subject of SharePoint Developer and ASP.NET Web
Parts, there are two great books on SharePoint development that I've been hearing
very good things about lately. The first book is Todd Bleeker's "Developer's Guide to the Windows SharePoint Services v3
Platform" which has a 5 star rating (out of 5) on Amazon after 11
reviews, and which has been burning up the Amazon most popular lists the last
few months:
Figure 1
The second book is Darren Neimke's "ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in Action: Building Dynamic Web
Portals" which provides a great way to learn how to build sites that
use ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts, as well as how to build custom Web Parts of your
own:
Figure 2
The beauty of web parts is that with ASP.NET
2.0 you can now build ones that can work and be customized by end-users within
any ASP.NET web site/application (no SharePoint required), as well as have
these same web parts work and run within SharePoint 2007 (both the free Windows
SharePoint Services edition as well as the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
version). This provides a tremendous amount of developer power, and opens
up a lot of options.