One of the reasons I've been a bit out of commission lately is all the hard work I put in to the latest SkyDrive release.  Along with a few of the other developers, here are some of the things we accomplished in our "Milestone of Quality"

• Fixed a few bugs with the way we handled ETAGs and caching headers
• Made a general way of including css sprites instead of images on the server.
• Added sprites for commonly accessed small images across the site.  This reduced some pages from loading 20 images to 5 images.
• Moved all static content to a CDN that supports GZip for both http and https.  This should really help our international users, since it brings our images, script, and styles closer to them.
• Enabled GZip compression on all dynamic html content over both http and https.  This was done with the built in IIS compression parameters, which I'll post about in a future post.

With all of these changes, we managed to bring our page load times down pretty significantly.  I won't go into all the numbers here, but I will say that a typical user's SkyDrive home page went from 17 seconds to 8.  Not bad!

For fun, here are some of the sprites you'll see when loading SkyDrive pages: