From time to time you might want to create a completely blank page in SharePoint. I found myself in this situation e.g. when the business requirement was to create a customizable SharePoint page that is to be displayed in a popup window or an iframe, and it should not contain any navigation, branding, breadcrumbs or ribbon.

The easy approaches I can see are:

1) Create “blank” MasterPage

You might create a blank MasterPage, which will hide some placeholders on a server side (so there’s less markup sent to a browser), and add some CSS styles to hide the other components (e.g. ribbon which is not placed in any placeholder).

Role of the timer jobs in SharePoint

Timer jobs are a convenient way to perform background tasks in SharePoint. Writing custom jobs for our solution lets us define job schedule and report progress using a simple API. When the job definition is added to a farm (e.g. from solution code, usually on a feature activation event receiver), we can also manage the job and monitor progress of the running jobs in Central Administration (http://server-name/_admin/ServiceJobDefinitions.aspx).

A look at the architecture

The process that is responsible for executing timer jobs is OWSTimer.exe. Jobs can be associated with either an Web application or Service Application. If you need more information about the architecture and internals of this part of SharePoint, be sure to check the article by Veena Sarda [1].