From what I can see, pageflakes.com and my.msn.com are built over asp.net webparts infrastructure. However there are some fundamental differences I found:

Normal webparts page uses postback which reloads the whole page. Ofcourse we can wrap it with Updatepanel, but it still causes partial update, while msMsn / Pageflakes are purely based on webservices. If you check firebug console, no page update are made, only webservice call to send the changes to server.

Is there any straight forward way to do this with asp.net webparts, or if not, what is the roadmap of building such application?

I hope my question is clear enough. Please let me know if I'm missing a concept / understanding

Thanks

If you really want to have a great overview of how to create such a web 2.0 ajax enabled portal, I can highly recommend Omar Al Zabir's book Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5.

He's the founder of pageflakes.com and the open source portal called dropthings.


Dropthings Source Code