SharePoint & WSS_Medium

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been trying to determine the overhead involved with updating data via SharePoint WebParts vs. ASP.NET WebForms. To get started, I created a simple WebPart to render the request's query params to a HTML table. So, the first problem I ran into is that a WebParts do not have access to the params collection due to CAS. When I exec'd the page, an error regarding "LinkDemand for AspNetHostingPermission failed" (or similar). So, my WebPart didn't have this permission. I added it to GAC, but elevating it to Full trust probably isn't a good idea. Thanks to several blog posts (Debugging Web Parts - a full explanation of the requirements in particular) I changed the system.web/trust config from level='WSS_Minimal' to 'WSS_Medium' This brought my WebPart back to life, and I believe I'm operating in a least required security mode now.

Applications in SharePoint

I'm architecting a solution for a customer which would benefit from several features in SharePoint 2003 (Tasks, Alerts, doc repository, etc.) The solution will need several of these concepts, and I hope SharePoint's features will be a good match. However, I'm concerned that data entry pages will be complicated by the fact that SharePoint uses WebParts in zones on the page. This is similar to other frameworks I've used, yet so far I have not been able to determine the amount of additional overhead required to do data entry in SP.

WebParts are very similar to Server Controls in ASP.NET -- code in an assembly writes HTML to the output stream. No big deal from the output standpoint, but you don't get as much of the input benefits from ASP.NET controls (DataGrid is a good example).

Big Gaps

Wow! It's amazing how long the "dry spells" are between my blogging activities. Too busy!