12.6. Summary

This chapter introduced you to the WebPartManager, WebPartZone, and WebPart controls. These controls allow for easy customization of the look and feel of either the Web Parts or the zones in which they are located.

This chapter also showed you how to create your own custom Web Part controls and how to incorporate AJAX into these controls. The capability to create your own controls was always one of the benefits provided by ASP.NET, and this benefit has been taken one step further with the capability to create Web Part controls. Web Part controls enable you to take advantage of some of the complex features that you do not get with custom ASP.NET server controls.

You may find the Portal Framework to be one of the more exciting features of ASP.NET 3.5; you may like the idea of creating modular and customizable Web pages. End users like this feature, and it is quite easy for you to implement.