Well it's been close to a year now since SharePoint 2007 was released! I remember a year ago how it was really tough trying to figure out how to customize, deploy, manage, and patch bugs in SharePoint.
In the past year, many teams have spawned SharePoint addons which make SharePoint development much nicer and faster. You'll find below a few articles I found useful.
Fixing the user credential prompt on Vista with Office 2007 & MOSS 2007
It's been an issue at Vertigo for the past year and we're glad to have found a solution to it! Basically, when accessing Office docs stored on MOSS 2007, from a Vista machine with Office 2007, you'll be prompted for your credentials even though you're already authenticated on a domain.
Hotfixes to install on your Vista box:
After installing both fixes, your credentials will be passed correctly. I tested it on my two machines. For reference, I got it from this article.
SharePoint with Forms Authentication (fully featured and simple to install!)
It's been done in a lot of places, but these guys made it quite simple to implement on a SharePoint install. It has all of the forms based auth pages you need, with barely any effort to install. They even have a CAPTCHA to prevent bot registration. Check it out:
http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=CKS&ReleaseId=7675
For picks and more explanation, see the team's blog post.
SharePoint with Live Authentication!
What a relief! We had to implement Live authentication ourselves and it was not pretty. Now it's packaged, ready to go:
https://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=CKS&ReleaseId=7746
For picks and more explanation, see the team's blog post.
Customizing pages in the "_layouts" folder
These are typically settings pages, but also data entry and security management. I would recommend method 1 too:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944105/en-us
LINQ to SharePoint
How better does it get? I mean who likes writing CAML and talking to the object model.
The VS 2008 Beta 2 addon (RTM next month?): http://www.codeplex.com/LINQtoSharePoint
I also found a nice tutorial about it:
