Silverlight deployment to browser

I have an application for a huge business, which needs many pages, controls etc. The .xap file easily goes up to 50MB. I notice that every time when I load the page, the .xap file got downloaded to my local. However, my users may use 3G network to connect, so it must be very slow if we downlaod the app everytime they open the page. So I was wondering if there is some way I can do the deployment similar to WPF, which only download to 开发者_StackOverflow中文版local when the version is changed....

Any other suggestion to improve the loading speed is welcomed.

Thanks a lot

First and for most get your web server caching headers sorted. Typically you open the ClientBin folder in IIS Manager and enter the HTTP Response Header section. Set expiry to something like 1 Day (or if you update during normal working hours set to 15 Minutes). Note just because the content expires doesn't mean it will be re-downloaded but it does mean it'll get cached before being used. The browser will inform the server of the version it currently has if it has expired allow the server to simply respond with "go ahead and use that it hasn't changed since the last time you checked".

For such a large system you should seriously consider dividing the app up into multiple dll projects. Then use the Application Library Caching feature found in the main apps project properties. You need to create the appropriate .extmap.xml files for each of your dlls. Many of the SDK and Toolkit dlls have them already. This results in separate .zip files for these dlls being placed in the ClientBin folder and not incorporated into one large Xap. This allows you separate slow moving / never changing code into a set of zips and more frequently changing business code into another set. When you update the app the you only update the changed zips thus reducing the download burden of a new version. (Note this only works with inbrowser based apps).

In the serverlight project option, check the Reduce XAP size by using application library caching.