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If you’re looking for a primer in programming with SharePoint, the following are a few good resources provided by Microsoft:

• MSDN Ramp Up
  • From the site: Ramp Up is a free, online, community-based learning program, with a number of different tracks that will help you build your portfolio of professional development skills. Ramp Up has a solid foundation of premium technical content from subject-matter gurus, and provides easy-to-access content in a variety of forms that guide you in learning the important skills
• SharePoint Developer
  • A primer series on developing with SharePoint from Microsoft.

True to their word (as if there was any doubt), Microsoft today released Silverlight 2.0 to the masses. Go get it here.

There are also some great tutorials which can be found here.

Mike Ammerlaan has an old(er) post up on his blog relating to integrating the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions (1.0) into SharePoint.  While his post does follow the standard integration instructions for the most part, he does offer some insight into including a ScriptManager in any custom web parts as well as working with UpdatePanels (which can be troublesome prior to MOSS 2007 SP1).

I might play around with implementing a custom receiver to implement the web.config changes as more and more clients begin to request this functionality in their MOSS implementations.

To inherit the master page from the current site being browsed in a custom application page (i.e. a page that resides in the “_layouts” directory), you can use the following PreInit method:

private void Page_PreInit(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            System.Web.UI.Page page = sender as System.Web.UI.Page;
            if (page == null) return;
            if (page.MasterPageFile == null) return;

            HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;
            string currUrl = context.Request.Url.ToString();
            string basepath = currUrl.Substring(0, currUrl.IndexOf(context.Request.Url.Host) + context.Request.Url.Host.Length);
            //Use RawUrl, otherwise it will always use the root web.
            currUrl = context.Request.RawUrl;
            if (currUrl.ToLower().Contains("/_layouts/") &&
                page.MasterPageFile.ToLower().EndsWith("application.master"))
            {
                currUrl = currUrl.Substring(0, currUrl.ToLower().IndexOf("/_layouts/"));
                using (SPSite site = new SPSite(basepath + currUrl))
                {
                    using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(currUrl))
                    {
                        page.MasterPageFile = web.MasterUrl;
                    }
                }
            }
        }

Just add the code above to your code behind, and your custom page will now inherit the look and feel of the site it is currently in.