I am putting today's post out there in a hope of getting more of a feel for what the community does in regards to web parts.  The question is when you need to write custom functionality on a SharePoint site (i.e.: a form, some fancy data binding code, whatever), do you build a web part or do you build a web user control and expose it through some sort of SmartPart.  It may be that there is a best practice here or it may just come down to personal preference.  Personally, I don't really care to do HTML markup using code.  That is not any fun at all and makes it difficult to do any kind of changes.  On the other hand if you want to make use of custom properties that the end user can customize, building a web part is the way to go.  So what do you prefer?  How do you choose what you build?  Leave a comment and let us know.