My current project is real-life portal type page to integrate a number of existing products. At first glance Web Parts and .Net AJAX seem like the obvious choice for this. The update panel control not being able to accomodate webpart zones, and the lack of support drag and drop for browsers other than IE are major problems. Are there any real portal sites like "live.com" that are actually based on webparts?

Most of the sites use javascript and AJAX driven web part concept implementation (Code and samples available at www.dhtmlgoodies.com)
Howeer if you are making a web based application with complex data and/or charts in web part(s), I would recommend using webparts. In our web based product we finally had to resort to using .net webparts as we had to display lot of charts and reports.

Yes, I developed my site & hosted it on

www.classall.com

it uses web parts..

see it

Hey just to let you know you site is not working at all.

Hi Nick,

Did you ever find a solution to this problem?

 

Thanks,

Angela

Nick Coleman :

My current project is real-life portal type page to integrate a number of existing products. At first glance Web Parts and .Net AJAX seem like the obvious choice for this. The update panel control not being able to accomodate webpart zones, and the lack of support drag and drop for browsers other than IE are major problems. Are there any real portal sites like "live.com" that are actually based on webparts?

Hi Nick Coleman  ,

Basically Live.com,Pageflakes or bbc uses its own Engine to achieve that kind of functionalities.. i have discuss more in details here in this link below

http://forums.asp.net/t/1218677.aspx 

If you wanted to use ASPNET Webparts with Cross browser drag and drap functionality inside Update Panel then you can use the ATLAS webparts.. see the video tutorial below

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=198273 

But if you are new in aspnet webparts then i would suggest you to start with the basics first.. understand the webpart framework and its functionalities.. here are some links that you can refer with

http://www.beansoftware.com/ASP.NET-Tutorials/Web-Parts.aspx 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/09/WebParts/default.aspx

 

Regards,

vinz