From Michael's weblog, which pointed at two Sharepoint webcasts at the beginning of 2005:
25.1.2005 - SPS 2.0: Developing Sharepoint Solutions Without WebParts
Many people are actively developing Sharepoint solutions using the expected WebPartPage/WebPart paradigm. This is indeed a powerful model to be working with. However, it is not the only one that you can use. In fact, the Sharepoint technologies are split between back-end technologies (security, storage, searching...) and front-end technologies (templates, webparts...). As such, it is very possible to leverage the back-end technologies using other front-end technologies such as WinForms, Console Applications and WebForms. In this session, well outline why you might want to do this and well provide a truckload of code samples and demos.
24.2.2005 - Leveraging the Power of Custom Search and Ranking
In this level 400 presentation, well go extremely deep on authoring applications that utilize Sharepoints powerful search capabilities. Well provide lots of information about how to author search queries, how to execute search queries and how to leverage the ranking capability of the search index. Well also include a bunch of demos and some sample code.