As portals gain in popularity, both as consumer-focused information portals and corporate collaboration tools, developers are increasingly being told to integrate customized portal features. In this article, I'll take a look at the solutions Microsoft offers for creating Web portals and how you can extend these portals by building custom modules.

The Microsoft Web Portal Landscape
Microsoft currently offers three levels of portal creation technologies as shown in Figure 1. The first and lowest level is ASP.NET 2.0's Web Parts framework. This framework includes the core infrastructure needed to build a basic Web portal such as base Web Part classes and Web Part management classes. Although the framework lets you build a basic Web portal, it doesn't include any pre-build Web parts or information repository capabilities.