Last December I created a small utility to reduce the size of XAP files for modular Silverlight applications. It served my purpose at the time, but more recently I've been using the tool in the context of a new application, which revealed a problem related to localization. In some cases the application could crash because of satellite assemblies that are embedded into the XAP files.
The new version takes satellite assemblies into consideration: they are removed whenever the main assemblies is also removed. There are a small number of other issues that were fixed, like an incorrectly described command line parameter.
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Even though Silverlight has fallen out of grace with the powers that be, there are still some companies using it today for entertainment or line of business applications. Particularly for that last category, modularity can be a powerful tool in creating a flexible solution.
Over the past few years, I've worked with modular Silverlight applications based on Microsoft Prism. Every module is it's own XAP file, which is loaded on demand by the framework. Over the years, people have also rolled their own lightweight modular applications, also making use of XAP files. This article is about a specific problem with building these types of applications: optimization of the total application download size.
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Earlier today, I blogged about a reusable behavior extension to make debugging Silverlight apps a little easier. I wrote most of that article months ago and in the meantime I've added a second behavior extension to support Silverlight software development. I included it with the download, but some explanation about its purpose might be in order.
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If you're used to debugging ASP.NET web applications together with WCF services, you will know that Visual Studio automatically attaches the debugger to the service process in addition to the website. When you It doesn't do this for services being called from Silverlight. Instead, Visual Studio will probably warn you that the service call will fail, but we've taken care of that problem with the behavior extension from the previous post.
The solution is fairly obvious: you will have to make sure that the debugger is attached to both your web application and your service.
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If you've ever developed a Silverlight web application in conjunction with WCF services, you have probably run into some challenges when it comes to debugging the solution as a whole. Silverlight applications are limited to using services from the same server and port number as the application itself, unless the service explicitly allows external access through a clientaccesspolicy.xml file.
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