Ben Hickman's Blog

We have a new site to help .NET developers get going with SharePoint development:

http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com

The site is organized by SharePoint artifacts that developers can create to extend SharePoint:

• Web Parts
• Data Lists
• Event Handlers
• Workflows
• Silverlight Web Parts
• Page Navigation
• Page Branding
• Web Services
• Content Types
• User Management

I often talk to IT developers about SharePoint the development platform. The majority of intranet and Internet applications that you pick up ASP.NET to create can be created more quickly in SharePoint. With SharePoint, you can leverage the platform services (Permissions, Authentication, Administration, Site Model, UI, etc.) and focus more directly on your business problem. Also, the SharePoint Feature (as in "capital-F Feature") is possibly the holy grail of reuse. Features can handle from the small (think CSS snippets) to the large (.NET Assemblies, InfoPath forms, etc.), can be turned on and used by end users, and can be installed and managed by administrators. Very, very powerful.

Check it out.