I'm surprised at all of the positive responses. Let me just ask, do you mind creating your markup in code? As in HtmlWriter.BeginTag("br") (or whatever, sorry for not knowing the HtmlWriter api). That's considered best practices for creating redistributable web parts.
How about the Ajax Toolkit? Oops, off limits. Doesn't work due to a missing doc-type in the header.
And your laptop is running Windows server 2003, right? Because of course Sharepoint won't run on anything else.
I understand people defending their platform, but as someone who has had to do some work in Sharepoint, but doesn't any more ... let me say that developing for Sharepoint is the worst development experience of my life. Now, I've been pretty careful in my choices to date, so it's not the worst possible experience, but it's down there. Or, to put it another way, I would much prefer working in PHP than Sharepoint.
