[chef] Knife fundamentals (what did I miss?)

[Maven User < >]

Hi again all - 

While I'm working through my knife/chef-client woes on windows, I've been able to set up a few ubuntu vms (one server, one client).

Following the standard documentation, I have the communicating and can see them both via the webui.

A few questions:

1 - How do you tell chef to apply/deploy the software?  I updated the role for the chef-client but I never saw it get applied.  I had to restart the chef-client service.
2 - If I have my own software, how does this get transferred up to the chef server?

There's a lot of implied things on the wiki for setting up both the client and the server (and I think I fudged a few things to make it work for myself).

Can I verify some feedback/changes here then update the docs?