Just had to continue on my SharePoint rant. Today, I wanted to add a new page to our SharePoint project. The goal of this page is to get a PDF file from a web service, and download it to a browser. Originally, I had this built in to the postback event of the web part that let you request this file, where the event set a property such that, in the Render method, it would then grab the HttpResponse object, clear it, set the Content-Type and Content-Disposition headers, write it, and end. This worked great, causing a download box to pop up to download the file, except there was a rather peculiar side-effect: after this, none of the events on the control would respond anymore. You could click on any link or button, and nothing would happen.
So, I figured this viewing page had to be separate from the existing page. Instead of a postback, it'd be a hyperlink with a _blank target and an appropriate pair of querystring parameters to trigger the correct report to open in a new window. So I created a brand new web part. Then I created the .webpart file, and the elements.xml and feature.xml file. Then update the manifest.xml file and the .ddf file. Finally, (after wondering where the heck my web part was and calling another developer over to give me another pair of eyes), I updated the deploy.bat file. The web part, plus six other files — and that doesn't include creating the .aspx page in the document library to host the web part (a process that I still have to do manually, since I don't yet know how to add it to a site definition or template or whatever the heck it is).
Let's compare this process to standard ASP.Net. Create the page, which creates the code-behind and designer files automatically. And then... oh wait, no "and then"!
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