large silverlight site (hundreds of pages)

When you surf a silverlight site, I believe it downloads the site to the client.

Excluding practicality, lets say your going to develop a large full silverlight site with nearly a thousand pages of static content.

Is there any way you can set the compiler to div开发者_StackOverflow社区ide the silverlight app in small parts that will only download as a user attempts to access different areas of the huge site?

You need to use Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) of Silverlight. With it you can create small silverlight projects and load them when you need.
Here are some links:

3 Steps to MEF - Export, Import, Compose from silverlight.tv
When and Where to use MEF from silverlight.tv
Using MEF with Silverlight 4 for Extensibility from silverlight.net

To be more specific it downloads the XAP file to the client, which is the end product for your silverlight project.

(Input) Silverlight project -> (Output) one XAP File (containing the main assembly and its dependencies) compressed in a normal ZIP file, but ironically renamed to take XAP extension.

Yes, this is doable, see my answer HERE, you need the same methodology depending on the control (portion) you need upon a specified condition.