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Optimizing a Silverlight XAP File

I took another hard look at Regex Hero to see if there was any way I could remove the two remaining assemblies I still had in it. I did something similar once before by removing the Linq assembly a couple months ago.

But still, the Regex Hero XAP file was 170 KB and I knew these assemblies were taking up most of that. So I tried to find a way to remove the System.Windows.Controls and System.Windows.Controls.Toolkit assemblies. After all, I was using only a small fraction of their features anyway.

Well I was indeed able to remove the toolkit by getting rid of the expanders and dockpanels. I found that I didn't really need them. That saved 60 KB.

But I still needed the GridSplitter out of the System.Windows.Controls assembly so I wasn't willing to get rid of it. So I asked this question on StackOverflow. It seems that Microsoft released the source for all of Silverlight 2's controls. So I downloaded the source, pulled everything out necessary for the GridSplitter and made a new project out of it. After rebuilding it and including it in the RegexHero project, that removed another 60 KB. That brought the Regex Hero XAP file down to 51 KB.

So yesterday Regex Hero was 170 KB. Today it's 51 KB. That's what I'm talking about. You can see how fast it loads now by clicking here.

I've come up with a few other optimization techniques you can read about on my new site SilverlightXAP.  I've even created a project out of the GridSplitter that you can download yourself.
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