I think it would be a nice touch if the Portal Framework could have functionality included wherein a developer woulnd't have to drop a CatalogWebPart on the same page as being worked on. For instance, the Framework could include a method or property that allowed child/popup windows control the changes and then upon submission, commit the changes back to the parent page.

People are most certainly going to want to do this at some point, and undoubtedly someone will come up with a workaround if it's not standard, but it would be nice it came as part of the base functionality.

Thanks for listening!

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Jason Salas, MBA, MCP
Web Development Manager / News Anchor
Pacific Telestations, Inc. (dba, "KUAM")
URL: http://www.kuam.com
President, .NET User Group of Guam
URL: http://www.guam-asp.net
Mailto: jason@kuam.com

Yes, this is an interesting idea.

While this is not possible out of the box today, I believe we've architected things to have enough extensibility hooks to do such things. You'd do something along the lines of a custom CatalogZone that works via a popup UI...

Note to self: Interesting idea for a sample... :-)

Hi Nikhil,

Happy Holidays! Yeah, I've actually been thinking about this one for awile. I spoke with the product manager for Web Parts and he said, as you mentioned, in theory, it gets tricky managing server-side values with the client/parent window relationship, but he also said it's not too far fetched to work something out for a later build.

I think this would be really helpful, and would inevitably come up. I think WevParts are great, I just don't care for being limited to having to work within the same screen my Web Parts are on, especially in cases where my real estate is limited.

Keep up the good work, and thanks for listening!
Jas

I'd also like to see this for the EditorZone.

What I'd like is to be able to click the 'edit' verb on the web part and get a 'pop-up' showing the settings for that web part.

However, given how tightly coupled to the webpartmanager and webpart an editor zone is I don't think this will be posssible (although you could fake the appearance using DHTML).