Most Orchard shapes get created from part drivers, but they are a lot more versatile than that. They can actually be created from pretty much anywhere, including from templates. One example can be found in the Layout.cshtml file of the ThemeMachine theme:

WorkContext.Layout.Footer
    .Add(New.BadgeOfHonor(), "5");

What this is really doing is create a new shape called BadgeOfHonor and injecting it into the Footer global zone (that has not yet been defined, which in itself is quite awesome) with an ordering rank of "5".

We can actually come up with something simpler, if we want to render the shape inline instead of sending it into a zone:

@Display(New.BadgeOfHonor())

Now let's try something a little more elaborate and create a new shape for displaying a date and time:

@Display(New.DateTime(date: DateTime.Now, format: "d/M/yyyy"))

For the moment, this throws a "Shape type DateTime not found" exception because the system has no clue how to render a shape called "DateTime" yet. The BadgeOfHonor shape above was rendering something because there is a template for it in the theme: Themes/ThethemeMachine/Views/BadgeOfHonor.cshtml. We need to provide a template for our new shape to get rendered. Let's add a DateTime.cshtml file into our theme's Views folder in order to make the exception go away:

Hi, I'm a date time shape.

Now we're just missing one thing. Instead of displaying some static text, which is not very interesting, we can display the actual time that got passed into the shape's dynamic constructor. Those parameters will get added to the template's Model, so they are easy to retrieve:

@(((DateTime)Model.date).ToString(Model.format))

Now that may remind you a little of WebForm's user controls. That's a fair comparison, except that these shapes are much more flexible (you can add properties on the fly as necessary), and that the actual rendering is decoupled from the "control". For example, any theme can override the template for a shape, you can use alternates, wrappers, etc.

Most importantly, there is no lifecycle and protocol abstraction like there was in WebForms. I think this is a real improvement over previous attempts at similar things.