1
votes

I have bunch of common thrid party dlls that I use in multiple silver light projects. Each produce its own XAP files with same copy of the thrid party dlls. I would like to know, is it possibl to seperate the common thrid party dlls out and load only if the local cache dll is different from the common dll used by some other XAP that was previously loaded?

In other words, what I was thinking is, first time when I enter a new silverlight page, it would load the application XAp and the Common XAP file, from that silverlight app, I go to another silverlight page, which in turn loads another XAP but this time, it will not load the common dll XAP since it was already loaded by the first XAP load.

Thanks,

3

3 Answers

3
votes

If the third-party DLL's are well done, they'll come with an .extmap.xml file that allows for precisely this scenario. But you need to turn it on by checking the "Reduce XAP size by using application library caching" option in your Silverlight project(s). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd833069(VS.95).aspx for more details about how this works.

1
votes

I think a more optimal solution would be to try to minify your XAP/Zip files using something like ComponentOne XAPOptimizer. The problem with your approach is that you are introducing dependencies between projects that in no way could be managed if one or more projects change. This is a good resource for strategies to lower XAP file size.

1
votes

I believe that you have a main XAP which makes the calls to load the others XAPs, right? All you have to do is, in the properties of each DLL, change the atribute "Copy to Local" to FALSE, except on your main XAP. When the user download the main XAP, the DLL will be available to all dependents XAP.