Web parts seem to be used extensively in Sharepoint related development, but examples of using them in asp.net webforms applications are few and far between. I’m implementing a domain specific portal framework and like the ‘widgetlike’ functionality in iGoogle or pageflakes and would like to get that kind of feature in my application. The real troubling issue from my perspective is that the drag & drop layout features of web parts do not work in non-IE browsers unless you use the latest ASP.NET AJAX futures library. It seems to me if Microsoft meant this to be a foundation technology, they would have moved these features into the main product by now.
Are web parts a dead-end technology? If so, are there any alternatives?
i think they are (dead), at least for developing the types of UI modern web-browsers are looking for. My recommendation … ASP.NET MVC and a nice .js library. It’s more work out of the gate, but with the proper planning and implementation it will serve you much better in the long run.