Improve WPF Application Coldstart: Suggestions to run program when machine starts up.

Question

Is it possible to load your WPF application when the machine starts up? Our WPF application is taking 30 seconds on our existing client hardware, and we'd like to "hide" that by having our application startup when the machine is booted. But the fact that our application boots on startup should be invisible to the user.

How would we go about building such a thing? Is there a term to google that will provide a tutorial? It would be nice if there's a WPF specific-one we can grab.

Note: In case there's any moral qualms to this (since I agree that having 20 programs startup when your computer does is frustrating!), we're building software for a specialized industry who will be using their computer to run primarily our applications.

Answer 1

The easiest approach would be

• make sure your big libraries are installed in the GAC
• write a dummy app that uses (most of) those libs. Actually use them so they get loaded.
• run the dummy on startup
• make the dummy stop by itself, or keep it alive hidden

This would in no way interfere with the starting of the normal application. The benefit is that the libraries get loaded and jitted. The drawback that your app still needs to load & initialize.