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Like me you might sometimes struggle to describe the breath of the Microsoft stack across all the various products.

I must give credit to the Microsoft people who come up with these great looking diagrams:

Almost all SharePoint developers will know about the U2U CAML Query tool, I just thought I’d throw a little link love their way.

If you live under a rock, this tool provides a nice GUI for you to generate those nasty CAML queries:

This is a fantastic tool, I have no doubt that it will save you plenty of time.

Just remember to remove the <Query> opening and closing tags before you use it in your code.

I've just been reading Foundations of Programming, it's a free e-book from Karl Seguin of codebetter fame.

Well worth the time and the download.

It covers ALT.NET, ORM's, Dependency Injection, Unit Testing and touches on design patterns. It ends with a look at how the CLR manages memory such as boxing, pinning, the heap and stack.

BDC associations allow you to create master / child type relationships with the Business Data List Web Part and the Business Data Related List Web Part.

From the MSDN article, the following points should be followed:

• The entity that defines the association method must be below all of the entities to which it relates within the XML metadata file.
• The association method must have input parameters that map to the identifiers of all the source entities.
• The return parameter of the association method must include the identifiers of the destination entity.

I would recommend watching the associated 10 minute video from the MSDN article as well.

I’ve previously posted about a great resource for the new MOSS developer. Well here is another great resource to help the developer get their mind around the workflow’s in SharePoint.

The MSDN article is: Developer Introduction to Workflows for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007

This article covers the following topics:

Introduction to workflows

• The workflow architecture
• Workflow Types
• Workflow composition
• Workflow mark-up
• Workflow’s that are specific to SharePoint
• Authoring SharePoint workflows with both SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio, with topics that draw the comparisons of each product.

Again its another meaty document, I think my first resource still stands as the document for the newbie to read, if they come back for day two, maybe throw them this link.

By default IIS does not return content that it does not have a mapping for, this will probably effect your first Silverlight deployment.

Before you deploy any Silverlight content you will need to add a mapping in IIS for the .xap extension.

The key is to register a MIME type for .xap for the application/x-silverlight-app type.

Also

Some Silverlight 1.0 applications may use .XAML that is being served directly from the server, so it might be prudent to also add this MIME type:

.xaml for the application/xaml+xml type

Today I was asked if it was possible to have a different icon display in the search results if the returned document was a PDF.

The answer was yes.

Here’s how:

• Save the image to the <12 hive> \Template\Images\   directory
• Edit the following xml file:  <12 hive>\Template\Xml\DOCICON.XML
• Add the following line: <Mapping Key="pdf" Value="pdf.gif"/>

*Note the <12 hive> is normally located at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12

I’m sure everyone has seen the famous ‘hamburger diagram’ (if you look closely it kind of forms the share of a hamburger)

The diagram shows the end-to-end product offering from Microsoft. The diagram points out some MOSS specific technologies such as Excel Workbooks, but it doesn’t highlight and BDC type interactions which I’m not sure how they would be modelled on this diagram since the BDC can return data straight from the data sources at the bottom, if they did include the BDC the diagram may not look like a hamburger anymore :)