VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects & the SmartPart Sample: Site Collection Search

Last week Patrick already pointed to a nice web part: Site Collection Search for Son of SmartPart. Basically this web part allows you to search through all the sites of a site collection in SharePoint. Typically this feature is only available in SharePoint Portal Server search. 

There are a couple of things that make this a *fantastic* demo/sample web part:

  • It's using the SmartPart to show an ASP.NET 2.0 Web User Control in a web part. Advantage: great developer experience.
  • It's using the connectable framework to connect two different web parts. Advantage: high flexibility for end users, customizable layout.
  • It's using the WSS Object Model from inside a web part to search in all the sites of the site collection.
  • It's using Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects to compile. (more on this below)

So what are the Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects? Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects provide additional functionality for building and deploying Web site applications that you create in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. This add-in includes a new tool to merge the assemblies created during ASP.NET 2.0 precompilation, and provides a comprehensive UI within Visual Studio 2005 for managing build configurations, merging, and using pre-build and post-build tasks with MSBuild. Think of ASP.NET 1.x compilation style for VS 2005. If you need more info, Scott Guthrie has written an excellent overview.

2 Comments

  • Jan -- I got it! Just needed to move the .dll to the bin folder. Duh...

  • In your page of "Building Web Parts the Smart Way Starting with the SharePoint SmartPart", in the second example where it says:



    public class CalendarControl : System.Web.UI.UserControl, SmartPart.IUserControl

    {

    . . .



    How can I do that but in VB.NET, for example I wrote this:



    Public Class CalendarControl

    Inherits System.Web.UI.UserControl

    Implements SmartPart.IUserControl

    ....



    but I have an error, and I can't execute that example, can you help me?



    Thanks

    Excuse me for my english

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