Assembly Caching Infragistics Silverlight control assemblies

[Infragistics] Devin Rader / Thursday, July 15, 2010

Way back in Silverlight 3 Microsoft added a feature called Assembly Caching which allowed developers to configure their Silverlight apps in such a way that the assemblies needed by that application could be cached on the client.  This means that the actual XAP file that is downloaded by the client can be dramatically reduced and the client would only take a one time hit to download the initial set of application assemblies.  After that the application would use the locally cached assemblies.

The Silverlight tools in Visual Studio make it simple to enable assembly caching in your application.  You simply open your Silverlight projects settings and check the Reduce XAP size by using application library caching checkbox:

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Visual Studio will automatically enable assembly caching in your application and you will see in your ClientBin a set of additional Zip files that contain the assemblies referenced by your application.  Visual Studio figures out how to do this by looking for special files in the same location as the application assemblies called Assembly Part Manifests (*.extmap).  To leverage assembly caching with Infragistics controls download the manifest files for the 2010 Volume2 release below:

Simply drop these files in the same location as the control assemblies and you can start using Assembly Caching.