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This article discuss about the Web Parts, new feature introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. You can see many websites that are modular in nature today. Many websites often organize their content into modules that allows for personalization.

Information is broken down into manageable parts which end users can rearrange or move around the parts to suit their preferences. User has also the flexibility to save his preferences for future browser sessions. This way, end user can be empowered to personalize site dynamically.

Before ASP.NET 2.0, developer had to build his own custom personalization framework to implement personalization feature in the application.

In ASP.NET 2.0 you can build web portal that offer personalization and modularization of information using new Portal framework. This new framework provides effective way to build a modular web site that dynamically reapplies settings on a per-user basis. Web Parts are objects in the Portal Framework which the end user can open, close or move from one zone of the page to another. Web Parts are included in ASP.NET server control framework and are used like any other ASP.NET server controls. You can also build your own custom Web Parts.

Don't confuse ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts with Microsoft SharePoint services even though they use same Portal Framework. These two technologies are not the same.
Advantages of Web Parts

1.Web Parts allows for personalization of page content. They allows users to move or hide the Web Parts and add new Web Parts changing the page layout.
2.Web Parts allows user to export or import Web Parts settings for use in other pages. Web Parts retain the properties, appearance and the data across the pages when imported or exported.
3.Web Parts can be assigned role-based access. So you can determine which Web Parts can share by all or which should be hidden for certain roles. This helps us to provide customized content based on security.
4.Web Parts can talk to each other. You can utilize the data in one Web Part in another Web Part for different purposes.