So I've been looking through the new (as of 5 Nov 2008) SharePoint Guidance on Microsoft.com at www.microsoft.com/spg .
It's not immediately obvious, but if you click on the last (right-most, at least in left-to-right languages) breadcrumb, you get a drop down list of other very useful sections that are also SharePoint P&P Guidance.
Under Development Activities for example,there are 7 How To's - go here to see them all: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd206918.aspx
The one that is currently of interest to me is How to: Wrap a User Control Inside of a Web Part for SharePoint. This is because I need to build a web part or two right now, and a user control provides a nice design surface, that the web part itself does not. This article provided step by step instructions, but no code download. Since I had to create a web part anyway, I followed the instructions and posted the resulting project to my 3rd CodePlex project, http://www.codeplex.com/PNPUCinWP .
You can download it from there - it should save you some time.
Also, one of the two QuickStarts shows 3 different ways to access a SharePoint list. The three ways are:
- Direct list access
- List Item Repository (1 layer of abstraction)
- Entity (such as Announcements) Repository (2 layers of abstraction)
These are explained at the end of the QuickStart, which is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd206917.aspx
--Michael