Articles on MSDN International

• Building Custom Alert Result Channels in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (June 2004)
  Understand how .NET developers can extend Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with custom alert result channels. Learn about offering users extra channels on which to receive alert results. This article works through the Quick Alerts alert result channel as an example.
  
• How to Customize Your Search Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (October 2004)
  Explore three ways to incorporate Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Search (service) into custom Web pages, SharePoint Web Parts, Microsoft Windows applications, and other smart-client front-end applications such as those in the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions.

Articles on MSDN Belux

• Building Web Parts the Smart Way (February 2005) (together with Jan Tielens)
  Building web parts is one of the main extensibility points when you work within a Windows SharePoint Services environment. The development steps of building SharePoint web parts is well-documented in books, in the Windows SharePoint Services SDK and in a whole set of articles, tutorials and walkthroughs available from the SharePoint community or from Microsoft directly itself. One of the major disadvantages of following the traditional web part development steps is that building web parts this way requires extensive coding with respect to the UI you want to provide within the web part. At the time of writing, there is no designer available for developers to create the body of a web part in a very WYSIWYG manner. This article describes another approach to building SharePoint web parts. The approach consists of making use of ASP.NET user controls to make up the body of the SharePoint web part. The technique leads to a dramatic increase in the productivity of anybody creating web parts. The article ‘Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part II : Web Parts and User Controls’ published here on the Belux MSDN site last year describes the basic steps. The idea of using ASP.NET user controls in web part development received a lot of adoption in the SharePoint community and has evolved in a generic framework called the SmartPart. In this article we will highlight what the SmartPart is and how to use it when involved in SharePoint web part development.
  
• Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part I : The Basics (May 2003)
  This article is part one of a series of articles demonstrating in a hands-on manner the different techniques of building, packaging, deploying and using Web Parts in both Windows SharePoint Services sites and SharePoint Portal pages. The focus of this first article is on the basics. You will learn how to create a Web Part in Visual Studio .NET 2003, package and deploy it, and some of the debugging techniques. The Web Part built will allow a user to enter the name of an author in a text box and access the Amazon Web Service to retrieve all the books written by this author.
  
• Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part II : Web Parts and User Controls (Aug 2003)
  Several people mentioned the possible usage of user controls in the development process of Web Parts for SharePoint pages in the newsgroups available on the Web. This article summarizes all these ideas and describes a framework for building Web Parts making use of ASP.NET user controls.
  
• Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part III : Connectable Web Parts (Feb 2004)
  Part III of the SharePoint series discusses the basic steps of creating connectable Web Parts.  Windows SharePoint Services provides a very good framework allowing users of these sites to drop Web parts onto their pages. We have discussed in part I how to create and deploy these Web Parts. Part II introduced a technique to boost the performance of developing Web parts by making use of ASP.NET user controls to deal with the design of the body of your Web part. In this article, we are going through the basic steps of creating two Web parts that are able to interchange data with each other. Developers of Web parts can implement standard WSS interfaces (provider and/or consumer) that are recognized by the WSS Web part framework and as a result allow users of the Web parts to make a connection between the two.
  
• Processing InfoPath Data in SharePoint Forms Libraries (Oct 2003)
  Some time ago, I had the opportunity to have a talk at the Belgium MSDN community regarding opportunities for .NET developers to extend the Windows SharePoint Services. In addition to the Web Part development (see also my 2 articles on building Web Parts), and the access to the SharePoint object model and related XML Web Services, I demonstrated how to create document event handlers in VS.NET that hook up to a SharePoint form library. The goal of the .NET code was to process the incoming InfoPath XML. In this article I provide an overview of how to accomplish this. In addition, it shows you how you can avoid complex XPath statements within your .NET code by generating an object model out of your InfoPath form and de-serialize the incoming XML to an object created from the root class. I hope it gives you some ideas to improve your productivity when developing these types of applications.

.NET Magazine (Dutch magazine)

• Het Information Bridge Framework 1.0 (.NET Magazine #6)
  Traditioneel is er een diepe kloof tussen de Line-Of-Business (LOB) systemen waarin operationele gegevens worden beheerd en de desktopomgeving met Microsoft Office die gebruikt wordt door de informatiewerkers. Beide omgevingen hebben een gezamelijk doel, met name het ondersteunen van de bedrijfsprocessen, maar hun invalshoek is verschillend. Het Microsoft Information Bridge Framework (IBF) laat ons toe om beide werelden te verbinden. IBF is een nieuw framework speciaal ontwikkeld voor de informatiewerker die gebruik maakt van een of meerdere Line-Of-Business-toepassingen maar gelijktijdig met Microsoft Office 2003 wil werken. IBF is vooral inzetbaar bij organisaties waar er een nood is om informatiewerkers meer productief te maken, door bedrijfstoepassingen en -processen toegankelijk te maken vanuit Microsoft Office smart-clients.

Other Sources

• COM+ and .NET Interoperability, In all its simplicity (U2U Site)
  The objective of this hands-on is to demonstrate how existing COM+ applications and new .NET applications can interoperate with each other. You will be guided through a number of demonstrations in a step-like manner.