Running ASP.Net apps inside SharePoint

I just completed Chris Johnson's tutorial for bulding a asp.net page based sharepoint app.  Along with not knowing exactly how sharepoint deploys features I'm struggling to figure out where the .dll has been placed.  Also, has anyone built a more complex applications like this.  I adpated Chris' tutorial to build an employee lookup app...still very simple.  However, with the lack of design view working correctly I'm wondering if anything more complicated could be developed.  We have some rather complex forms that need to be built some of our apps and not having a working design view would render this task impossible.

Any feedback or info that any of you can offer would be huge.  I really would rather build our .net web apps and run them inside sharepoint like this and deploy them this easily as opposed to launching them in another browser.

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2008/06/07/updated-building-a-simple-asp-net-page-based-sharepoint-application-in-visual-studio-with-the-visual-studio-extensions-for-wss-1-2-with-visual-studio-2008.aspx

Regards,

Brandon

Hi Brandon,

Creating solutions in such a manner I find difficult at best.  Though you may no have a choice at times.  On the same note, I am a huge fan of application development on the SharePoint platform.  However, I recommend a different approach.

Have you considered a pure Web Part approach?  Breaking an applcation down into smaller pieces has its advantages:

1. Promotes and lends itself to the reuse of those components (Web Parts).
2. Allows you to pread the development responsibilities; i.e. more developers can be involved.
3. Easier to develop and debug component parts, eliminating many problem areas before assembling the application itself.

If you do have to resort to a holistic application, you may want to consider breaking each section down into controls.  Controls have the advantage of being designed, developed and debugged using the visual tools we have come to love so much!

Hi Bob,

We've considered a pure web part approach but we've run into that learning curve issue and have been looking for ways to tame it a bit. We  haven't considered breaking things down into controls.  That could be very flexible for us and what we want to do. 

Thanks for the tip! :)

Regards,

Brandon

 Hi, I'm fairly new to the SharePoint thing but I did find an interesting blog about deploying ASP.Net applications within SharePoint

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2006/09/05/740498.aspx

Looking at option 4,I wouldn't call it an easy solution, but it does give you a good step by step process to follow and will allow you to debug your solution before it actualy enters the SharePoint realm.

Cool!  That's a good find.  I've browsed through the site before but I haven't stumbled onto that posting yet.  Thanks for posting it here.