R – Silverlight Architecture Guidance – Lazy Loading

silverlightsilverlight-2.0

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?

Best Answer

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.