Via Randy Drisgill’s blog, this sage advice (as if you needed it, right?) on themes, master pages how SharePoint works to confound modifications and why you shouldn’t make any changes outside of your dev environment:

Disabling Themes on Master Pages

Turns out, the key to having SharePoint NOT apply the theme automagically is to have a master page that is NOT customized (unghosted). If you apply your custom master page from a Feature instead of customizing it with SharePoint designer, SharePoint will no longer add the meta tag and thus will not load the theme.

Word.

Just picked up this tip that you’d think would be common knowledge, but it isn’t.  And it’s pretty cool.

Say you’re having issues with Outlook – it’s not connecting or is intermittent.  What do you do?  We all know we can click the Outlook icon in the task tray, but have you tried holding down the CTRL key while doing the same?  You get two new items in the context menu:

Notice them?  Connection Status… and Test E-mail AutoConfiguration…

The first menu item brings up a dialog that provides a listing of all the server connections Outlook is maintaining for you and the status of various activities:

Test Email AutoConfiguration brings up a really handy utility for validating your connection to Exchange Server (or any other POP3/SMTP server for that matter):

All this troubleshooting magic is courtesy of the CTRL key.  Who knew?

Late-breaking news:

The SharePoint product team has announced that MOSS is now supported on SQL Server 2008.

I won’t rehash their content – hit the site and get it firsthand.  For those in the field, there are more than a few compelling features that would support a migration from SQL 2000 or 2005 – a big one is encryption, however there are of course some common-sense caveats to that.

Get them here.

I could relay the yadda-yadda on the virtues of applying the SPs, but I figure that’s being done to death out there already by more capable folks.  Ok, I’ll toss this bit of verbiage in:

1. SP1 advances the art of application development

The new ADO.NET Entity Framework feature in SP1 offers developers a model-based paradigm and a rich, standards-based framework for creating data-oriented applications shared across multiple applications and platforms. The separation of presentation, data, and business logic used in concert with a single data model will enable developers to spend less time writing plumbing code and more time refining business logic.

2. SP1 makes data-driven programming easier

SP1 offers developers support for ASP.NET Dynamic Data, which provides a rich scaffolding framework that enables rapid data-driven development. Since ASP.NET takes care of creating the presentation layer, a fully functional Website is output and ready for customization without the developer writing a single line of code. Furthermore, with ADO.NET Data Services, Web developers can create RESTful Web 2.0-style applications that have better server scalability and improved caching support.

3. SP1 is the fastest and easiest way to deploy Windows applications

With the .NET Framework Client Profile, a small subset of the Framework that powers client applications, developers can offer their end users a dramatically streamlined and rapid application download experience. In addition, improvements in SP1 result in dramatic reductions in cold start times, allowing developers to serve a broader set of customers with varying hardware profiles.

Just came across this rather interesting post by “morgan” on the blog PHP vs. .NET in the oft-used “Top x Tools to do Y” format (always popular in the dev community).  Despite being common, I think Morgan’s list is a good compilation of resources that should be in your kit if you’re developing ASP.NET solutions, including SharePoint:

1. Code Profiling – RedGate ANTS – Personally, I use AQTime because it works well with both ASP.NET and SharePoint 2003/2007 instances.
2. App Stress Tool – NeoLoad – Never used it myself, as I’ve preferred to use Visual Studio Team System’s web test projects for this purpose.
3. Performance Monitoring – perfmon – But of course!  You can also hook up VSTS to track performance counters and record results – this feature has been available in Visual Studio since 2005, and offers a better way of visualizing this critical operational data.  Mind you, if you are on a server and just need to see what’s what, perfmon is still the standard.  Looks even better on 2008!
4. HTTP Recorder – Fiddler 2 – No arguments here.
5. Interface Manipulation – FireBug – Definitely one of the best browser add-ons;  I use it interchangeably with the IE Developer Toolbar.
6. Debugger -Windbg – This is a given;  if you’ve never used it, give it a whirl:  It’s a great tool.
7. FX-Cop – For policing the standards to keep the code clean;  it’s worthwhile, even if you’re a one-man show.
8. ViewState Decoder – A good idea for ASP.NET and SharePoint apps – Sometimes ya gotta see what’s going on in that mess of stateful info on your page.
9. Text Editor – UltraEdit/Notepad2 – I prefer the latter – to each their own.  I definitely like being able to bring up a lightweight editor with syntax highlighting, regex patterns, hotkeys and shortcuts, etc.

Morgan also offers up the venerable .NET Reflector by Lutz Roeder – a staple if you’re developing against the SharePoint API since the documentation can be at odds with reality.  It’s great to be able to crack open Microsoft.Sharepoint, find your object and see how it works in disassembled C# or VB.NET or any other .NET language.