SilverlightShow: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1) Comments

Re: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

newemployee909090 — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:29:19 GMT

Mr. Kevin Dockx:

Thank you for posting the information about Assembly Caching associated with Silverlight XAP files. It made our Silverlight / Pivot Viewer module within our Web application run at least 30% faster.

Thanks,

Web Developer

Re: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

KevinDockx — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:11:00 GMT

@steve buddy: No, the code above is for OOB applications. OOB applications have no support for Assembly Caching.

@Rakun: The Controls.Toolkit assembly is from the Silverlight toolkit - you need to have that installed to be able to run the example code.

Hope this helps!

Re: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

Rakun — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 09:02:46 GMT

Hi Gill

when I downloaded the source code & run it on my system it throws error like

"Line: 54
Error: Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application
Code: 2152
Category: InitializeError
Message: Failed to download a platform extension: System.Windows.Controls.Toolkit.zip
"

Re: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

Rakun — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 08:48:43 GMT

Hi Gill

when I downloaded the source code & run it on my system it throws error like

"Line: 54
Error: Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application
Code: 2152
Category: InitializeError
Message: Failed to download a platform extension: System.Windows.Controls.Toolkit.zip
"

Will above source code automatically download new versions everytime silver application is reloaded in browser if needed

steve buddy — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 04:30:21 GMT

I have a coupld question on assembly caching and I will relate it to the above source code.

When first loading the silverlight application into a browser is the System.Windows.Controls.Toolkit.zip and System.Windows.Controls.zip files automatically download for the first time, and then using the code shown above and below will automatically download the same to files from the server if the files cache in the browser are different from the one on the server when the silver application is reloaded in the browser? Is this correct?

   this.CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted += (send, args) =>

        {

            if (args.UpdateAvailable)

            {

                MessageBox.Show("A new version of the application is downloaded, please restart the application to launch the new version.");

            }

        };

    this.CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync();

RE: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

David C — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 20:22:18 GMT

Hi, if a user clears their browser's temporary internet files, does that clear the OOB assembly files - i.e. does tne user at that point lose the ability to run offline OOB until they go back online and re-load the app?

RE: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

Matt — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:30:09 GMT

There is a much simpler way to use the browser's cache: append the version of your XAP to the URI for it. Browsers equate cached objects with URI's, so once your version changes, so does the URI, and that forces the browser to download the new version. It's as simple as doing this in your object tag:

now your URI's look like:

app.xap?1.0.1.2

app.xap?1.0.1.3

app.xap?1.0.1.4

etc

RE: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

Rodney — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:40:33 GMT

Thanks Kevin, I would really love to see an article on OOB assembly caching (even if it is a custom solution using Isolated Storage) - I think this would be really helpful).

RE: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

Steve White — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:14:02 GMT

Kevin, we are using MSBUILD, I will look into setting the expiration. The real issue is I dont want it to expire immediately because then the silverlight app will reload every time and I need the caching so that users dont have to wait for the app to load. I started looking at this article http://codeblog.larsholm.net/2010/02/avoid-incorrect-caching-of-silverlight-xap-file/. Just havent hide time to follow through with it.

Thanks for the response

RE: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

KevinDockx — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:36:04 GMT

@Steve: are these web app packages you're using, or the Publish option from VS? With those packages, you can deploy your IIS settings as well - one option would be to set the expiration on current date + xx minutes, so after deploy, the content would expire very fast.

@Rodney: I'm not sure on Microsofts' reasoning on this. There *are* ways around this, however: you could use the Isolated Storage to cache your external assemblies as well, or even the complete XAP(s). However, this will require a lot of plumbing...

RE: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

Steve White — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:06:15 GMT

What do you suggest when you have 30 IIS servers hosting the application? For us an ideal situatuion is that the xap file would cache indefinately unitl i put a new version up to the IIS server. We have build jobs that we run to deploy it to our iis servers.

RE: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

Rodney — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:58:35 GMT

I really don't understand why assembly caching does not work in OOB. Is it a technical reason (I can't think of one)... I would guess that the majority of LOB apps are OOB...

RE: Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1)

Adam — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:50:54 GMT

Thank you, I have known about zap caching for a while but always wondered about the workings. I look forward to the other two parts!