How to reduce the Size of your Silverlight Application with Telerik Minifier

Vuyiswamb
Posted by in Silverlight category on for Beginner level | Points: 250 | Views : 9368 red flag
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Telerik Assembly Minifier is a tool that lets you extract only the controls’ classes and resources you need to use in your application development, thus significantly reducing the size of the assemblies. Using the Assembly Minifier you will achieve significantly better loading time when the XAP files containing the minified (optimized) assemblies are to be loaded on the client side.

Introduction


Telerik Assembly Minifier is a tool that lets you extract only the controls’ classes and resources you need to use in your application development, thus significantly reducing the size of the assemblies. Using the Assembly Minifier you will achieve significantly better loading time when the XAP files containing the minified (optimized) assemblies are to be loaded on the client side.

Brief introduction


Soon most of you will be writing Silverlight applications. Depending on your requirements of your project. Some of you will make mistakes I did by including unnecessary resources in your project. As a newbie in a subject you might never know what is needed to run your application, infect you might be convinced that the .xap file contains all the resources needed.  But this is not always the truth. If you are building small applications in Silverlight, you might never feel the difference, but with big projects where .xap files are even separated you will feel the performance pressure. Telerik as a Provider of Silverlight and other .Net controls for different platforms created a wonderful free online tool, that can Minify or rather let me say that can help you reduce the size of your .xap file by removing unnecessary resources in your xap file



How can you minify your Xap or your Silverlight Assemblies


  1. Open the application at: http://minifier.telerik.com.
  2. Browse and upload Telerik Silverlight Assemblies, the ones that you want to optimize. See the tips at the bottom, for more information on uploading.
  3. After you select and upload the assemblies,the Assembly Minifier will automatically start processing and analyzing the files.
  4. Then, you will be able to select only the controls you will need in your application.
  5. As soon as the analyzing process finishes, you will be able to see the relative size of each control.The size is just for comparison purposes and does not mean that the output assemblies will have the exact same size as shown in the TreeListView.
  6. Once you finish the selection, you can click the Extract button.
  7. As soon the server processes the Extraction, you will be prompted to Save a ZIP file containing the minified assemblies.
  8. If you want to try the minified assemblies in an existing project:
    1. You should first remove the references to the old assemblies
    2. Clean up the Visual Studio Solution
    3. Add references to the newly created (minified) assemblies
    4. Build the Solution
  9. If you want to use the minified assemblies in a new project you should simply add reference to the newly created assemblies in the project. If you have troubles referencing the assemblies, you may need to check the assembly files for the Lock bit and unlock them if needed – right click on the file, go to Properties/Unlock assembly)


Conclusion

I was talking to Sheo today , and i said Telerik makes silverlight just too easy. If you advice your company to buy Telerik controls , you would have done the best thing for them.

if you want more info on the minifier visit Telerk's Blog here

http://blogs.telerik.com/blogs/posts/10-06-10/telerik_assembly_minifier.aspx


Thank you Visiting Dotnetfunda
 
Vuyiswa Maseko


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About the Author

Vuyiswamb
Full Name: Vuyiswa Maseko
Member Level: NotApplicable
Member Status: Member,MVP,Administrator
Member Since: 7/6/2008 11:50:44 PM
Country: South Africa
Thank you for posting at Dotnetfunda [Administrator]
http://www.Dotnetfunda.com
Vuyiswa Junius Maseko is a Founder of Vimalsoft (Pty) Ltd (http://www.vimalsoft.com/) and a forum moderator at www.DotnetFunda. Vuyiswa has been developing for 16 years now. his major strength are C# 1.1,2.0,3.0,3.5,4.0,4.5 and vb.net and sql and his interest were in asp.net, c#, Silverlight,wpf,wcf, wwf and now his interests are in Kinect for Windows,Unity 3D. He has been using .net since the beta version of it. Vuyiswa believes that Kinect and Hololen is the next generation of computing.Thanks to people like Chris Maunder (codeproject), Colin Angus Mackay (codeproject), Dave Kreskowiak (Codeproject), Sheo Narayan (.Netfunda),Rajesh Kumar(Microsoft) They have made vuyiswa what he is today.

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