XapReduce 1.1

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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XapReduce: Optimizing Modular Silverlight Applications

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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