Silverlight Architecture Guidance - Lazy Loading

Question

Background: We have an offshore group working up a Silverlight 2 prototype for us. There is the conception that we need to be very concerned with lazy loading of various "screens"/parts of the application. The offshore group has decided to dynamically load assemblies in order to achieve this; however, I would think MS has already dealt with this issue.

Question: Does Silverlight already deal with loading assemblies in an intelligent manner or is that something that we will have to be concerned with?

Answer 1

Silverlight does have a built in ability to fetch various bits of the application in an on demand basis. However all these bits would be listed initially in the manifest.

However I suspect your partners are thinking in terms of dynamically determining new chunks of the application being downloaded and displayed even after the intial xap has been built.

I don't think you should be too concerned about this, its not actually excessively difficult to achieve.

Answer 2

Cut+paste from my existing answer on another question.. Jesse Liberty has some decent tutorials on multi-page Silverlight apps:

Tutorial and Update

You can make your initial app nothing more than a basic "stub" and then load the other bits once you at least have some GUI available. Doesn't come out of the box, but it's straightforward to do.

Answer 3

Tim Heuer has a good video explaining how you can dynamicly load assemblies at runtime:

http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=65687

There should also be a version of the Prism toolkit from the Microsoft PnP people sometime in the 1st quarter that will help with that.