Will Silverlight take too long to load my business app?

Question

I'm thinking that Silverlight 4.0 would be a good choice to build our business application.

However, the one part I'm afraid of is the loading. If I understand it correctly, Silverlight compiles ALL the pages into one binary, which is loaded on the client at load time. It's fine now with just a few pages, but if I reach hundreds of pages, will this load time get extremely long? When I look at examples on Infragistics and Telerik, they take a good 10-15 seconds to load just those few examples. I find this unacceptable.

Are there ways around this?

Answer 1

Yes, it is indeed a problem. But the binaries (xap files, which are really just a zip of the dlls) are served up via standard HTTP, so they can certainly be cached (as configurable via your web server). So the first download might take 15 seconds, but all subsequent loads should have basically no download time (unless you release an update).

Also, the Telerik examples have all of their dlls referenced, and you can eliminate the ones you don't need in your own project to reduce overall size.

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

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

I think Telerik offers one such tool too.

Lastly, in 4.0, you can set certain System dlls to load on demand instead of up front which can improve download time (but I haven't personally used this) - -it's in the project properties.