By now TypeScript shouldn’t be something one has to introduce.

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

If you haven’t already done it, go and see the intro video for TypeScript, check out a tutorial and visit the typescript playground. There are other javascript libraries which extend javascript and are compatible/compile to javascript: Dart and CoffeeScript. To be honest I had never time to try those. The fact that TypeScript is well integrated into Visual Studio which I happen to work within all the days (intellisense, compilation checks and more) did me curious. This post is actually not about TypeScript itself, but a test to use it in SharePoint. In this short “lab” I even had Web Essentials 2012 which automatically compile typescript files into plain javascript files on save. This is what I did: Install TypeScript and Web Essentials 2012 Create a SharePoint-hosted app: Create a new TypeScript file in the autogenerated “Scripts”-module and call it “Greeter.ts” Just save the file as it is. The new file is created: Greeter.js Now we don’t need to copy this file to the app, so remove Greeter.ts from the Elements.xml file (or comment it out): Open the Default.aspx from the Pages module and add the reference to the new javascript file:

Many words have been said about the importance of performance when working with javascript files. Here I want to summarize what developers can do to increase the performance related to javascript. I found many tips on blogs. Here comes my aggregated list of actions one can do to speed up sharepoint (and not only) sites with focus on javascript:

1. Load only sharepoint stuff you need

Use prefetch option to only load sharepoint javascript files that needed. To see the difference, just add ?prefetch=0 to your sharepoint url in the browser. The downside of this lazy loading is that you wrap all sharepoint related javascript into ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded otherwise you maybe invoke some of javascript objects and functions that are not loaded. So the prize of this huge performance improvement is a high awareness by a developer when and which scripts are loaded and run.