Here are two essential links for beginner SharePoint 2010 developers:
- Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010
- Deploy solution packages (SharePoint Server 2010)
The second link is especially important as I found that, even though I did everything by the book, samples from the SharePoint SDK were not properly deployed from within Visual Studio 2010; however, the deployment did succeed (and the deployed solution was indeed usable) when deployed from the command line.
