Learning Sharepoint today is very easy with the Virtual Labs; you don't have to setup you Sharepoint environment, Microsoft will do that for you and for free.
This is very good quality learning material; I've noticed today that Microsoft provides new MOSS labs, not just WSS.

 

After spending 2 years at U2U as a Sharepoint and Workflow trainer with Patrick Tisseghem (we all miss you, Patrick!), I've decided to join the ECM business unit of the Devoteam group where
I'm the Sharepoint practice Manager of a young and enthusiastic team of
Sharepoint developers, but still I remain a Sharepoint trainer.

This ECM unit of Devoteam (based in Leuven, Belgium) is specialized in 2 products :

• LiveLink from OpenText  (a leader in the Gardner magic ECM Quadrant)
• Sharepoint (another  leader in the Gardner magic ECM Quadrant)
  
  OpenText plays a very important role in the Sharepoint story by providing among others a real archiving solution to Sharepoint (far beyond the record center), provides some vertical solutions on top of MOSS.
  

We are specialized in fixed price projects (we believe in our team) and we recently won a big contract in the Netherlands. If you need some help on your Sharepoint project, don’t hesitate to call our ECM sales guy.

Several years ago, Devoteam took over Guidance, a well known training center based in Brussel (I worked for Guidance before going to U2U) and the R&D unit of Nokia Siemens Network.

And yes, I'm still a Sharepoint trainer: our training center, Devoteam-Guidance, uses the Ted Pattison Sharepoint training material which is excellent.

See you at Tech Days where we have a booth. And if you show me that you are interested in Sharepoint, I’ll let you try our Segway !

In the meantime, I’ll be heading to the MVP summit in Redmond.

If a value has a key-name that matches the name of a field on the task content type, that value is written to the matching field. If a value's key-name does not match any of the field for that task, the value is written to the SPListItem.Properties object of that task. The SPListItem.Properties property returns a System.Collections.Hashtable object. Writing data to this object makes it available through the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 object model".

1. My task is associated with a content type with site columns  called "Comments" and "Description"
2. in my workflow code (MOSS sp1)

            Task1Properties.AssignedTo = initFormData.Reviewers.ContactList[0];
            Task1Properties.Description = "bla bla";
            Task1Properties.Title = "my title";
            Task1Properties.ExtendedProperties["Comments"] = "my comments";
            Task1Properties.ExtendedProperties["Description"] = "descr";
            Task1Properties.ExtendedProperties["Contract"] = "my contract";

However, In the Task.properties I don't get a Contract item in the Properties collection. The custom properties are not propagated  as mentioned by the sdk !!!

I will report this bug (could be fixed in sp2 or in SharepointvNext)

 

 

I've recently used the new Visual Studio Extensions for Sharepoint 1.3 CTP released a few weeks ago; I like it because it is more flexible than the previous version (and you can use it on 64 bits); you can copy your files to the 12 Folder without deploying a new solution, and many other nice feature.  For more details see this post from the Sharepoint team.
I've discovered an annoying bug : you can only rename a WebPart (folder) one time; the associated files are only renamed the first time you do it; or you have to restart Visual Studio. I've just reported this bug to the Connect web site this afternoon.