What's the XAP file equivalent of ASP.NET

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What's the XAP file equivalent of ASP.NET

Is there such a thing? Maybe there should be, I don't think Microsoft built anything like this but is there a similar format or framework for ASP.NET that let's you deploy an archive -- that is -- your ASP.NET web application, or module that works in the same way?

A xap file is a self-contained archive. I'm particularly interested in the things they're showing with Silverlight 4 and application partitioning. In that you can drop in additional xap files that extend or show up as new things in your app without recompiling the existing stuff.

I guess the closest thing would be an assembly. It is totally possible to compile an ASP.NET website into a single assembly. Basically you would need to compile your project normally, then precompile the website and then you could combine all those resulting assemblies into a single assembly using ILMerge.

Andrew Hare 2010-03-11 13:56:34

What about *.asxp, *ascx, *.css, *.png all the content and markup that has to be there. If it were just code, it would be one thing, but it's this mix of content and code that needs to be packaged, and then unpackaged or composed into a bigger picture application.

John Leidegren 2010-03-11 15:01:55

You can use embedded resources for those.

Pierreten 2010-05-12 22:47:57

You can wrap your application in with the Web Platform Installer and get a single deployable installer for your entire site and the common major dependencies/frameworks, this is the closet equivalent that I'm aware of. Some popular projects have deployments available in this fashion, see here for a list.

Hanselman did a post on how to package your app this way that might be a good starting point to get a feel for the process.

Nick Craver 2010-03-11 14:13:40

This is not a question about deployment, in that I wanna deploy and entire application. It's about application partitioning. I wanna deploy an application in small pieces.

John Leidegren 2010-03-11 15:00:26

@John - Not sure that's possible as they're all compiled against one another. Can you give an example of how you'd split an application, which pieces?

Nick Craver 2010-03-11 15:02:39

There's a lot of fuzz about this on Silverlight TV (search Channel 9) through MEF a surface is exposed and a component or control pops in there when discovered as belonging to this exported surface. Basically any part of the application could sit in one of those self contained xap files as long as their mutual dependencies exists shared somewhere else. It's all very magical and very interesting.

John Leidegren 2010-03-14 16:12:12

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What's the XAP file equivalent of ASP.NET

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