I think that they will be popular as a deployment model for applications that use the SharePoint.Client namespace with javascript and Silverlight. I can certainly hide the ribbon with javascript on the client – but I shouldn’t have to. I remain concerned that there is no good answer to #2 with regards to client side code. It would be nice if SharePoint allowed some sort of trusted caller infrastructure that allowed elevation to site owner. This should be possible at least with Silverlight

Sometimes you may do some serious customization to a list’s forms and build related business logic that precludes the use of the ‘Edit in Datasheet’ feature that comes with every list. Unfortunately, there isn’t an ‘Allow Edit in Datasheet’ checkbox anywhere on the List Settings page. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to handle this requirement that are fairly simple.

I just got done with a Live Learning Web cast for AppDev on User Profiles and My Sites and it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly have been worse. I had serious machine issues for the first 30 minutes and couldn’t get my profile import configuration to save. I kept getting an error message about connecting to the database on the profile configuration screen. This was very strange as everything else seemed to be working – I’d expect the Shared Services Administration site to fail completely if the database server was borked.