I’m in the deep end at the moment.  SharePoint 2010 provides an improved mechanism for service applications that replaces Shared Service Providers.  I’m not ready to say I understand how these beasts (and they are a beast) work yet, but I can tell you that at this early stage of the 2010 release cycle (i.e. very nearly RTM) there is bugger-all documentation available.  The following list may prove useful if you want to get started learning this.

Andrew Connell has a video and some sample code from Channel9.  The video is very hard to watch but there are a few tid-bits that may prove useful.  The sample code is also useful but not as complete as I’d like (for the client end there is only a powershell script to test).

Tony Bierman has a 4 part series that steps through the process and explains the various files in some detail, but again, this is not totally complete (there are no sample PS scripts) and the example is unusal (a web service for autocomplete).  Plus he has added a few extra features to the code which are useful I’m sure – but confusing when you are learning.

MSDN of course has a bunch of sample and documentation – but this seems to be the most incomplete version I have found – I’m sure it will improve when SharePoint is actually released.  Sridhar Raghunathan has posted a fixed version of this sample but it is also somewhat incomplete (no admin pages or deployment scripts).

There is another one here that I haven’t looked at.

I also got my hands on a presentation and some training kit material (not public yet sorry) which helped a bit.

My current solution is a blend of all of these samples – which are generally similar.  How I just need to make it work.

More later…