Reverse Alchemy

Recently I’ve been working a lot with the SharePoint standard templates. A client wanted us to build a Web Part that had the look and feel of a standard SharePoint Web Part and the easiest way to achieve that was using templates. Using these, we didn’t have to worry about custom fields, save buttons, validation [...]

In his excellent post on How SharePoint 2007 Renders Its Content Geoff McElhanon shows how to programmatically load SharePoint-based templates. The code he shows us is as follows:

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// Initialize template container with our custom template
templateContainer = new TemplateContainer();
templateContainer.Template =
SPControlTemplateManager.GetTemplateByName(RenderingTemplateId);
 
// Add the container to the webpart control hierarchy
Controls.Add(templateContainer);

However, I ran into [...]