Web Part Interoperability -- Good News and Bad News
So we’re getting ready to unveil a little bit tomorrow and a lot on Wednesday regarding WSS “v3” and our Office “12” servers, but a couple of things have popped up that are very, very relevant to people that want to develop Web Parts using ASP.NET 2.0 and use them in today’s versions of WSS and SPS. As the old cliche goes, I’ve got good news and bad news….
The good news first: within a couple of days, some people we all (well, at least I) know and love will be announcing something very nice and very helpful for those of you who want to develop ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts and use them in WSS (once Service Pack 2 is released, of course). It’s their news to announce, so I’ll wait for them to do it and post and update with a link.
The bad news: it will only work with WSS (again, with SP2). The SPS team tried, but ran into too many issues to be able to support running SPS 2003 Service Pack 2 on the ASP.NET 2.0 runtime. So if you have SPS in the picture, you can’t use Visual Studio 2005 or ASP.NET 2.0. You can call Web services and redisplay pages written with ASP.NET 2.0, but that’s it. SPS 2003 SP2 will actually do a lot of good things (more news on that coming up soon), but unfortunately, ASP.NET 2.0 support won’t be one of them.
WSS-only deployments will be able to run on version 2.0 of the .NET framework and will allow — up to a point — the use of some new ASP.NET 2.0 technology in the process. The announcement at which I’ve already hinted will take advantage of that aggressively.
Starting tomorrow — PDC news from the floor, the hallways, and the session rooms….
