Will Silverlight load my business application for too long?

Question

I think Silverlight 4.0 would be a good choice for building our business application.

However, one part that I'm afraid of is loading. If I understand it correctly, Silverlight collects ALL pages into a single binary file, which is loaded on the client at boot time. Now that’s fine, just a few pages, but if I get to hundreds of pages, will this load time be very long? When I look at the examples on Infragistics and Telerik, they take a good 10-15 seconds to download only these few examples. I find this unacceptable.

Are there any ways around this?

Answer 1

Firstly, what can inflate the xap size is the dll and any native resources you imported (large images, etc.). Therefore, if you have a relatively homogeneous site based on the same appearance / templates, adding new pages will not significantly increase the overall size, since the necessary components are already in xap, and the additions will consist mainly of text.

Of course, if new pages have functionality / use of controls or components that require additional DLLs, this will weigh it, but when you talk about one application that can grow to hundreds of pages, I assume that they will be somewhat consistent.

In addition, Silverlight can download content as needed. If you can separate content and / or content descriptors / assets with code, you should see if it can be stored in a database or other repository and retrieved only if necessary.

You can also load other xaps dynamically at run time, allowing you to first load the light load xap, and then bring others on demand, and thereby distribute the load time based on what the user needs during the "session".

Answer 2

Yes, this is really a problem. But binary files (xap files, which are actually only zip files) are served via standard HTTP, so they can, of course, be cached (as can be configured through your web server). Thus, the first download may take 15 seconds, but all subsequent downloads should have basically no download time (unless you released the update).

In addition, the Telerik examples have all the links to their DLLs, and you can eliminate those that you do not need in your own project in order to reduce the overall size.

There are several products and methods for adding additional compression to your xaps (since they are just zip files)

http://www.google.com/search? q = silverlight + xap + compactor .....

I think Telerik also offers one such tool.

Finally, in version 4.0 you can install certain system DLLs for loading on demand rather than up, which can improve loading time (but I personally have not used this) - in the project properties.

Answer 3

It is also possible to use multiple xap files so that you can split the application into separate xap files.

I have never tried, but if you are Google, you will find many articles. For example.

http://dotplusnet.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-load-multiple-xap-files-in.html