In many of my "How To" Videos and workshops, I find myself needing to build custom ASP.NET Forms to give me a higher level of User Experience choices and flexibility. However, if you've ever noticed, those pages are called by the Workflow Engine and are somewhat limited to use in a SharePoint Workflow scenario only. Well, the bases for how to build an ASP.NET Workflow form are the same as building an ASP.NET Page (aka., Custom Application Page) that would be hosted within a SharePoint site.
"When/Why would I ever do this ?", you might ask. It is a great solution for hosting ASP.NET forms for data entry, or to show information in a way that SharePoint Web Parts would be too difficult to customize or not visually as compelling as a standard ASP.NET page.
Here's an article that Ted Pattison, author of the Inside WSS 3.0 book wrote that shows how you the basics of how to pull this off. Mind you, it won't look as intuitive as you would think it would as an ASP.NET developer, but "it is what it is."
From the article:
You can create custom application pages to add user interface components to a custom solution based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Unlike site pages (for example, default.aspx), a custom application page is deployed once per Web server and cannot be customized on a site-by-site basis. Application pages are based in the virtual _layouts directory. In addition, they are compiled into a single assembly DLL. They are also used across all sites within a server farm. For these reasons, they perform better than site pages. With application pages, you can also add inline code. With site pages, you cannot add inline code.
Here's a link to the article: Click here to read
~ Robert Shelton
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