For a couple of weeks Sharepoint Foundation, the successor of WSS 3.0 and the “free” version of Sharepoint, has been available for download.
You can download the final version here and try it out for yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=49c79a8a-4612-4e7d-a0b4-3bb429b46595&displaylang=en
When naming your files, folders (but you usually don’t want folders anyway) and sites, avoid these characters:
& ~ # % * ? / + | ” . _ { } \ : < >
Underscore is to be avoided as the first character in the name, and multiple consecutive periods should be avoided. In columns and document library names I also prefer to avoid Norwegian letters like æ,ø and å, and spaces. I rather rename the column or document library afterwards, getting a nice looking name combined with a coder-friendly URL (I get no sleep when I see URL’s like bad%20url.)
Sharepoint 2010 has a very useful function called the Developer Dashboard. When you enable this, you see what kind of resources the different requests on the page uses, the different queries etc.
The dashboard can be always on, off or on demand. The latest option is the most useful for most scenarios, and gives you a button on the page that you can click on each page individually to view the dashboard. This way, you can even use it in a production environment (of course not for testing new functions, you have a development, testing and staging platforms for that, right?). To enable the dashboard all you have to do is run this simple stsadm command. You can also use Powershell if you prefer that.
stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv ondemand