I presented on MOSS Search at the Philly Dot Net Code Camp 2008.3 yesterday and once again it went well.  This was the largest code camp to date and it seems like they just keep growing and growing in size. 

I gave this presentation for the first time a few months back at the Philly Office Geeks user group meeting and noticed that I went into too much detail in certain areas and skipped over other areas.  This time I focused a bit more on content sources and scopes since they are the heart of SharePoint search.  I think that it still needs a few more touches before I give this presentation again. 

There was also an "Ask the Panel of Experts" session that I think went pretty well.  Honestly, not a whole lot of questions were answered during the session but there was a whole lot of lively debate that now that I think about it, shows a few things.  First, SharePoint is a huge product and one can easily focus on one area and making a good living doing nothing but that.  Second, Bill Wolf made this point and I think its worth mentioning.  If you look at what SharePoint 2007 is built on top of today, its pretty safe to assume what the next version of SharePoint will be built on top of.  That being said, really learn SQL Server 2008, .NET 4.0, and most likely Silverlight.

As promised during the session, here are my slides and code samples that I used.

20081011_CodeCamp_Moss_Search.zip

In my daily rss readings I ran across this little nugget of information that hasn't burned me yet, but something good for anyone working with the SharePoint Search API to tuck away for later.

http://blogs.msdn.com/nishand/archive/2008/10/02/fulltextsqlquery-with-querytext-length-gt-4096-throws-argumentoutofrange-exception.aspx

Long story short, make sure that the query text that you pass to the FullTextSqlQuery is less than 4096 characters otherwise your going to run into some errors.

I ran across this link and thought I would share it with everyone.  I recall a ways back when I was just coming up to speed with SharePoint 2007, I really couldn't figure out which is the "best practice", .dwp web part files or .webpart files.  If you look in the web part gallery, you'll see a mix of both which made it even more difficult to figure it out.  Over at DotNetMafia, Corey Roth was nice enough to write a post telling you what each one does, and how .webpart is the latest version and is the one you should be using. 

Check out the post here