What is a good pattern for designing widgets in ASP.NET?

Question

There is some desire to add widget-like components to the Default page of our corporate intranet, with things like job search, weather, etc. My original thought was to define the widgets as user controls, with a similar div structure, and use callbacks to communicate between the client and server, and jquery to perform some ui functionality. So far, it has been difficult to separate ui work from the actual logic. I then considered putting the controls in an ASP update panel, but since it doesn't seem possible to inherit from user controls, a large amount of the GUI work seems like it would need to be replicated between each control. Is there a better model for developing this sort of thing in ASP.NET, or should I look at something like ASP.NET MVC?

Answer 1

ASP.NET Web Parts

If you just want to skip straight to the overview page which describes some of the functionality of a web part and how to get them into a page:

ASP.NET Web Parts Overview

Answer 2

A job search widget is drastically different from a weather widget.

Each of them has their own unique properties and behaviour: a job search widget will have a search text box and possibly a listing of jobs; whereas a weather widget would have a image displaying the weather and some text displaying the temperature etc.

Since these controls are so different you can't have a cookie cutter solution for every widget that you want to develop.

You should look into MVC ASP.NET on your own time because it's really cool...but it's not going to help you with your widgets.