Preface

I really love working with SharePoint! I’ve been doing it full-time for the last half decade, including lots of late nights and weekends. One area that I’ve found particularly interesting is Web Parts. I like the nature of a Web Part since it can act as a standalone application inside the powerful SharePoint platform—or it can interact both with SharePoint and other Web Parts. A couple of years ago I owned a company that built its own portal software (which integrated with SharePoint, but that’s another story), and that product was based on a similar concept. When we started building our solutions on SharePoint, Web Parts was the way to go since we were used to the approach. One day I came up with an idea for a book about Web Parts. Yes, nearly all SharePoint platform books cover Web Parts, but not as deeply as I wanted to. I felt that there were much more to say about them. This book is the result.