SharePoint is being rapidly adopted by enterprises large and small as a platform for collaboration. One of the reasons for this rapid adoption is it's ability to be customized through the development of custom Web Parts. This session will take ASP.Net programmers through all of the steps needed to create a custom Web Part from scratch and make it available to Site creators in their SharePoint environment.

Microsoft likes to tout the fact that SharePoint 2007 is built on top of ASP.Net 2.0. While that is true, the fact is that there are a lot of differences, limitations and "gotchas" in working with SharePoint for the ASP.Net developer. One of the most common of these is working with data in the SharePoint environment. In this presentation we will build a SharePoint data structure explorer web part, using the construction process as a basis for getting to know the object model used for working with data stored in SharePoint.