Inside WSS 3.0
In a really weird coincidence today, I ran into a great book about WSS 3.0.
I have been busy hacking away at some old scripts that push around templates, etc on the file system for WSS and MOSS. The goal is to take a build from Team Foundation Server (TFS) and be able to deploy it to dev, test or production. I knew that WSS 3.0 allows you to deploy solutions using STSADM, so my famous old WSS 2.0 scripts could be truncated to just invoke stsadm on the different site collections.
I started poking around MSDN and found some great articles:
https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530302.aspx
https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530301.aspx
https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa544500.aspx
At the bottom, some astute developer added some sample code, which was great news. Who is this developer? Low and behold, it is my friend Dan Larsen, whom I worked with on several projects that included WSS/SPS 2.0 Internet facing sites for some really big telcos.
At the exact same time I was reading the MSDN stuff, one of our developers came to my desk to discuss some MOSS 2007 deployment stuff and mentioned this great book they had upstairs. One of the authors of " Inside Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0" is none other that Dan Larsen. Some weird planetary alignment all pointed to Dan today. The developers upstairs all were raving over how in depth this book was, that just came out this month.
Dan also has a great Visual Studio Template for deployment and Ajax Toolkit up on codeplex that allows you to create WSP packages.
Congrats Dan, and thanks for the nod in the book!