The impact of speeding up your website can mean happier visitors and customers, more traffic and increased sales and revenue. But, while some of the things you can do are quite simple and quick to do, others require quite a bit more understanding and expertise. In this episode, Ed Robinson, CEO of Aptimize, explains some of the fundamentals of website speed optimization and tells about some of the key tips, techniques and tools you can use to analyse and improve the performance of your site.

Show Links:
Microsoft DevDays South Africa
Web Page Test.org
The MOSS Show.com Test Results
YSlow
Fiddler Tool
Aptimize
Aptimize’s Speed Testing Tool
SharePoint.Microsoft.com
SharePoint.Microsoft.com’s Image Sprite
SharePoint Team Blog: How we did it: Speeding up SharePoint.Microsoft.com
Google’s Steve Souders’ blog: “Aptimize: realtime spriting and more”
The Official City of Durban FIFA World Cup site
Durban FIFA World Cup site test results

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:17 — 39.4MB)

While at the MVP Summit in Seattle, I recorded a couple of videos with the SharePoint MVPs and this is the first of those. In this show, Shane & Todd, the famous SharePoint admin duo, join us for a relaxed chat over breakfast to talk about upgrading to SharePoint 2010 as well as some of it’s other cool new admin features.

Show Links:
SharePoint 911
Todd Klindt’s Site & Blog

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:41 — 26.0MB)

The soon-to-be-released SharePoint 2010 is jam-packed with features – some upgrades to existing capabilities and some completely new. In this episode, Michael O’Donovan, SharePoint specialist from Microsoft South Africa, takes us through some of his favorite features in the new version.

Don’t forget about the TypeMock & BA Insight special offers – listen to the show for more.

Show Links:
Michael O’Donovan’s Blog
Information Worker Community

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (25.2KB)

In case you didn’t catch it during the episode with BA Insight, they’ve got a great special offer on just for listeners of the show. Download and listen to the episode to find out more.

Unit Testing, TDD, DI, IoC, Mocks, Stubs, Fakes, Refactoring – Not sure exactly what all these terms mean, or how they fit together? In this episode, Roy Osherove, noted Unit Testing & TDD expert helps us to understand what the various components, challenges and benefits of Unit Testing are, what some of the related tools and approaches are, and how to get started, building our knowledge from the ground up. Once the solid foundations are in place, we discuss TypeMock and their TypeMock Isolator for SharePoint product.

Don’t forget about the TypeMock & BA Insight special offers – listen to the show for more.

Show Links (whew, there are a lot from this episode!):
TypeMock & TypeMock Isolator for SharePoint
BA Insight
Roy’s Book – The Art of Unit Testing (direct Amazon link)
Roy’s web page, blog, and Tweets
vbUnit, nUnit, xUnit, mbUnit, Visual Studio Unit Testing
nMock, RhinoMocks, MOQ
StructureMap, Unity, AutoFAQ

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:08:27 — 47.1MB)

As part of the interview coming later this week with Roy Osherove (see Unit Testing With Roy Osherove), the guys at TypeMock have kindly offered a discount to The MOSS Show listeners on both the TypeMock Isolator and the TypeMock Isolator for SharePoint products. To take up the discount, listen to the intro to the most recent show (ISV Overview #1 – BA-Insight) for the discount code.

As I mentioned in the show intro, also on offer are a couple of free licenses for TypeMock Isolator – all you have to do is write in to the show with a great letter. The best letters will be read out in the show (you’ll be famous, too!) and will win a license.

A SharePoint Kata? What’s that? Well, it all goes back to Coding Katas, of course? Still not clear? Ok, let’s go back to the real beginning. In many forms of martial arts, a Kata is a series of exercises that is practiced over and over regularly in order to hone and improve one’s skills. Sounds like a good idea, no? So much so that Dave Thomas coined the term Code Kata as a practice of doing something similar to improve one’s coding skills. He’s even got a whole site dedicated to Coding Katas.

So, now we’re back up the stack to SharePoint Katas. The goal of this site is to propose and discuss Katas related to SharePoint. However, I don’t want us to just limit them to development-related Katas, because I think that administrators and even power users can benefit from doing some regular activities. Here are some possible benefits:

1. Improving, refining and honing existing skills, so we get better at what we do already
2. Repeating Katas over time, so we don’t forget something we did and knew in the past
3. Learning new SharePoint skills as we get to try a small (e.g. 30 minute) task focused on something we haven’t done before.

Some of the best Katas are those done in pairs! The goal of the SharePoint Katas site is to help us improve, share, discuss and learn together, so get involved by suggesting your own Katas, commenting on the ones there already, and helping to build some real SharePoint Ninjas!

Check it out at http://sharepointkatas.com/

The SharePoint ecosystem consists of a large number of vendors, partners, products, add-ons, and so forth. Just being aware of what is out there is a challenge, so we often end up re-inventing the wheel, at great time and cost, rather than using proven tools and products that exist in this market. This is the first episode in a series that will appear over time in the show where we look at some specific ISVs and their products to help us grow our knowledge of what exists in the market.

In this first episode in the series, we talk with Guy Mounier from BA Insight, Gold sponsors at the recent SharePoint conference, about the various add-ons and connectors they offer to the Microsoft Search offerings. Guy talks to us about the history of the company, it’s products and the advantages they offer.

Show Links:
SharePoint 2010 Beta Download Page
TypeMock Isolator for SharePoint
MSDN: Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7
Additional Tips from Beth Massi
Sahil Malik’s Thoughts on Windows 7 with SharePoint 2010
BA Insight

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:03:53 — 44.0MB)