[...]Visual Studio 2010 Visual Web Part Project — Gabe Hilado's SharePoint & ASP.NET Blog[...]…

[...]Visual Studio 2010 Visual Web Part Project — Gabe Hilado's SharePoint & ASP.NET Blog[...]…

You just saved me! I was getting the same odd null child control behaviour due to a messed up Register tag.

-Gavin

Porting a full-blown ASP.NET application to run in SharePoint, if I read you right, you’re creating Web parts that contain the Web controls. You’ll have multiple Web parts deployed with this approach. If the SharePoint site-collection that the app will be running on also have sub-sites, these Web parts may not stand on their own feet (they came from a .NET app, some of these “Web parts” will probably need data to be passed to it via forms-data or querystring). My point is your SharePoint Web Part Gallery will be littered with Web parts that probably cannot be used outside of your “application”. I don’t do these for “traditional apps” that I want to run in SharePoint.

I would recommend the following approaches instead:
a) Re-engineer the ASP.NET app to have Web services. You can then consume those Web services in the SharePoint pages (inline scripting)
b) Create a custom SharePoint Solution project. Just like in the ASP.NET project, you will have master-pages, Web controls, resource files such as images and JavaScripts. You package the solution as a SharePoint feature and you deploy to SharePoint. Activate the feature in SharePoint and those Web controls and pages should be available.

-Gabe

I am not certain is this is the desired approach. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

I am hoping that you will be able to confirm my approach below prior to me starting as it will be quite a lot of work but I am determined and will follow this approach if it is the correct approach.

I am trying to migrate the functionality of a legacy ASP.Net application. Earlier you helped me with a particular aspect of this migration which was to wrap the ascx user controls in Visual Web parts. I am now trying to complete the migration and would love if you could provide some guidance on my approach.

The legacy ASP.Net application consists of a series of ASP.Net pages which inherit from an Asp.net Master Page.

In the Master Page there exists two ContentPlaceHolders (cph_left, cph_center)
The first ContentPlaceHolder (cph_left) has its content filled with specific user controls that will always be there no matter what page the user is on, while the other ContentPlaceHolder (cph_center) is empty in the master page and is populated by each of the aspx pages such that the cph_center contains different content (divs, user controls etc. ) depending on the page the user was on.

In the legacy aspx page(s), the code behind has access to each instance of each ascx it has placed within the cph_center and thus is able to control them as needed. For example, depending on what options are enable, the code behind might hide or show a user control within a particular legacy aspx page.

As you may have gathered, I am attempting to port this application over to SharePoint and I am hoping you are able to confirm my approach.

Here is what I beleive I need to do but please tell me if I am wrong;

Step 1:
Create a page layout which inherits from my custom master page(s) and then add my ContentPlaceHolders (cph_left, cph_center) and any additional Web part Zones to support the dropping of Visual Web Parts.
In my custom layout page I would add the same visual web parts directly to page to ensure that the same user controls are always showing on the left side as was in the legacy application. This might also be accomplished through the use of a web part zone and customize this zone within each page.

I am fairly confident with how to do this and feel I will be able to create a page layout within Visual Studio to suit my needs. I have created some very nice master pages thus I have no issues with this step.

Step 2: (This is the step you helped me with which is complete)

Create visual web parts based upon the ascx user controls. This worked perfectly thanks to you. As a result I am now easily able to add these web parts to SharePoint and they access the legacy data and render as they do in the legacy application work as they did before. The area I struggled with was when a user control was a composite of other user controls. Your assistance helped me through this as such I have no issues with Step 2.

Step 3: (This is where I am unsure if my approach is the right approach)

In order to control the center content similar to the behavior of the legacy aspx page I think I need to create a new User Control which would encapsulate the exact same content as the legacy aspx page which includes any user controls that were part of that content within the legacy aspx page along with the existing logic that was part of the legacy aspx page’s code behind.
Once I have this new user control, I than turn that into a Visual Web part which would be used in step 5 below. Is this the correct approach or is there an easier way?

Step 4:

Place the visual web parts from step 2 on to my page layout within the cph_left ContentPlaceHolder.

Step 5:

Create site pages based upon the Layout pages created in Step 1 and 4 and place my Visual web parts as created in Step 3 into the cph_center ContentPlaceHolder.

Con you please confirm if this is the correct approach or not.

I’m glad you’re also able to resolve how to package your images!

-Gabe