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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 :)

Up until now I haven’t found a good resource to point a new developer who knows .NET but is new to SharePoint.

Well as what usually happens, I stumbled across this article: Introduction to SharePoint Products and Technologies for the Professional .NET Developer

• It covers everything a newbie needs to know:
• Benefits of SharePoint -
• Introduction to all the SharePoint components
• Using Visual Studio 2008 to build SharePoint solutions
• A comprehensive glossary of common terms
• A getting started guide

So I would add this to the list of must read items for that new starter, they have to start drinking from the fire hose at some stage!

The next Sharepoint topic I would like to cover is Shared Service Providers.

A Shared Service Provider (SSP) is responsible for handling:

• Profiles
• My Sites
• Business Data Catalogue (BDC)
• Excel Services
• Office Sharepoint Search

The idea is that the SSP handles all the above information in one place and your web applications can share the SSP. A web application can be associated to one SSP.

Planning SSP's is fairly easy, if you follow the Planning SSP's article you will notice the following:

A single SSP should be used if: There is no explicit reason to use multiple SSPs.

Your default thinking should be to use one SSP, unless you fit into the scenario's outlined in the planning article.

I was reading this excellent Excel Services resource: Excel Services Technical Overview.

It covers:

• What Excel Services is
• Managing Excel Workbooks in MOSS
• Business Intelligence Reporting and Dashboards
• Extending Excel Services

The particular bit of information that I was seeking was this diagram that outlines the core components:

Just a heads up to point out that you can download the stsadm command line parameter posters from here. You can print them out and put them on the wall next to the sample reference diagram.