I  was very excited to see that Omar AL Zabir, co-founder & CTO Pageflakes has created a very cool AJAX based Web portal http://dropthings.com.  And even more excited to see he has posted all the code in an open source way!   Now you can build your own Ajax portal fun! 

Dropthings is a open source Web 2.0 Ajax Portal that shows the power of several .NET Framework 3.5 technologies.  It supports widget based modularized website, drag and drop personalization of content and an open API for widgets.  It is the sample featured in the book, Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 and you can use it as a personal portal, a group website, a public portal or as a dashboard for an enterprise that aggregates services from different systems.

Download Dropthings

Visit the Codeplex Project

See it Live!

Cool Features

• Aggregation of content from external sources e.g. Flickr, Weather, Horoscope, and any type of RSS
• Highly decoupled Widget Architecture
• Homepage personalization using drag & drop
• Absolutely zero postback in the entire website
• Themes
• Full feature supported for anonymous users
• Open API for widget development

Technologies he shows off...

• ASP.NET 3.5
• An advanced REST call handler for asynchronous, transactional, cache friendly web methods
• Content Proxy for bridging content from external domain
• Themes
• Personalization
• Membership and Profile provider
• Anonymous Identification Provider
• Data binding using Linq
• Data Access Layer built using Linq
• Business layer built using Windows Workflow Foundation