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Silverlight App inside ASPX inside another Silverlight App's RadHtmlPlaceHolder

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HTMLPlaceHolder

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Lev Rosenblit asked on 10 Jun 2009, 11:38 AM

Hello,
I was wondering about the following scenario:
I have a silverlight application that provides a navigation wrapper with cool transitions and visual effect for switching content. the silverlight application (lets call it: wrapperSL) has a RadHtmlPlaceHolders that the navigation loads a different aspx page into it when changed. Some aspx pages contain other silverlight applications.

The reason i use the place holder and not just make xaml pages and load them, is that the application becomes very large when including all of those xaml's, and i have alot of code and controls already written in asp.net ajax.

will this scenario work well? or will it slow everything down?
are there better ways of accomplishing this?
Is it wiser to have a bigger application size and have all the content in xaml's?

Thanks,
Lev Rosenblit

6 Answers, 1 is accepted

answered on 10 Jun 2009, 02:05 PM

Hi Lev,

For intranet use a large Silverlight app is not a problem, but across the web loading several Mb of XAP content gets tedious if it is required frequently. There are guidlines on how long a page should load, to keep user attention, however so much depends on their connection speed.

The ideal approach is to dynamically download assemblies on demand as per the Telerik demo app, but it is obviously a bit more development work that way.

Your nesting of Silverlight apps was an interesting idea so I tried to create a recursive Silverlight page. It turns out you cannot reference the same page in the RadHtmlPlaceHolder, but can reference any other Html/Silverlight page. The time overhead of loading the nested pages is on a par with dynamically loading assemblies. I have not checked overall memory usage yet, but performance seems the same.

If you must use nested ASPX pages with Silverlight it will certainly work, but you lose the benefits of a single application written in one language. You might want to look at what features are must-have in your Ajax apps and make similar user/custom-controls in Silverlight.

Given the things you can do easily in Silverlight vs Ajax (and develop much faster), I am usually inclined to build a single large Silverlight app initially and then break out assemblies for dynamically loading if the load time is too slow. I noticed the RadEditor downloads a seperate RadEditorHelper.xap file, on demand, which is over 1Mb. It looks like Telerik made a similar decision when they built the RadEditor to keep it lean.

Hope this helps. Thanks for sparking off interesting ideas on new ways to use the HtmlPlaceholder!

Cheers,

Dave

answered on 02 Feb 2010, 08:28 AM

One of the aim of Silverlight developer is to keep the size application package i.e .xap file as small as possible.The larger the XAP file, the longer it takes to download, and if it grows too large, Silverlight might be unable to load it.

Below are the steps to load assembly on demand and with the benefits of strong typing.

Step 1. Create a Silverlight Class library.
For example say "SampleLibrary"

Step 2. Add a class to the SampleLibrary

Public Class SampleClass

    Public Function SampleFunction() As String
Return "From External library"
End Function

End Class

Step 3. Create a Silverlight web application

Step 4. Add Reference to SampleLibrary. After adding reference right-click on the SampleLibrary reference and change the property "Copy Local" to false. This will keeping the Assembly out of the XAP.

Step 5. Copy the assembly to ClientBin folder of web application where the .xap file resides.

Step 6. Add following to to load Assembly.

WebClient : Provides common methods for sending data to and receiving data from a resource identified by a URI.

        Dim wc As WebClient = New WebClient()

        AddHandler wc.OpenReadCompleted, AddressOf wc_OpenReadCompleted
wc.OpenReadAsync(New Uri("SampleLibrary.dll", UriKind.Relative))

After loading assembly from web server, AssemblyPart class's Load method loads it into the appdomain.

    Public Sub wc_OpenReadCompleted(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Net.OpenReadCompletedEventArgs)

        Dim part As AssemblyPart = New AssemblyPart



        If Not e.Result Is Nothing Then
part.Load(e.Result)

            UseClassLibrary()

        End If

    End Sub

Step 7. To use Strong Typing: Do not create the on-demand assempbly class object inside wc_OpenReadCompleted as silverlight's JIT complier will come in the way. When JIT compiler compiles wc_OpenReadCompleted method, it scans the method, finds that it references a type named "SampleClass" so tries to load "SampleLibrary.dll" so that reference can be resolved. Unfortunately, this happens before the method is even executed.
So always use the on-demand assembly classes in another method. In this way you can enjoy the benifits of strong typing

    Public Sub UseClassLibrary()
Dim objSample As SampleLibrary.SampleClass = New SampleLibrary.SampleClass

        Show.Text = objSample.SampleFunction()

    End Sub

answered on 05 Feb 2010, 01:24 PM

Hi Thanks for your reply..

i am facing issue to load the silver light in my aspx page.

i am getting error unhandled exception javascript error.

i tested in my application for testing loaded only sliver light its working.

but when i use in my aspx page(i have lot of code) its not working not loading silver light.
i have written this code for load the silver light.

</a>

</object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div>

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Silverlight App inside ASPX inside another Silverlight App's RadHtmlPlaceHolder

6 Answers, 1 is accepted