Meet the Telerik Minifier

Telerik Minifier is a web-based tool that optimizes the size of RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for Windows Phone assemblies and applications’ XAP file.

The application assemblies' and XAP file's size has a big impact on user experience, as unlike in ASP.NET applications, where DLLs always live on the server, in Silverlight and Windows Phone applications DLLs live in the XAP file. Before a Silverlight application can run, the entire XAP containing all referenced DLLs must be downloaded, which often leads to a slow application “startup” experience for your users. To maximize the Silverlight experience you need to minimize the size of your assemblies and XAP.

How Does the Telerik Minifier Work

Telerik Minifier gives you two options for decreasing the loading time of your application – reducing the assemblies’ size or the application’s XAP file size.

Reducing the RadControls assemblies' size
When you use RadControls for Silverlight or Windows Phone, you should only reference the assemblies for the controls you are using to avoid adding unnecessary DLLs to your XAP. But an assembly like Telerik.Windows.Controls or Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input holds many controls, and using just one brings the rest along for the ride. This is where the Telerik Minifier comes into play.

The Minifier allows you to choose a list of controls, styles and resources to be used in your application, analyzes the dependencies between them and then produces a new set of optimized assemblies. The new assemblies will contain only the selected controls and the resources used by them. Using the Telerik Minifier you can keep the downloaded size of your application to the bare minimum.

The screenshot below demonstrates the difference in size between the original and the optimized assemblies, where the optimized are only 8% of the size of the original ones.

Utilizing the optimized assemblies is super easy - just replace the old ones and reference the new, optimized assemblies in your application.

Reducing the application’s XAP file size
Telerik Minifier enables you to simply optimize the size of the produced application’s XAP file. Once you finished working on your application and it is ready for deploy, take the application’s XAP file and minify it with the tool. Detailed log file of the removed classes and resources will be provided at the end of the minification process.

Supported Features

• Reducing (minifying) the size of Telerik RadControls for Silverlight or RadControls for Windows Phone assemblies – the tool lets you optimize the size of all Telerik assemblies by choosing amongst the controls and features contained within the assemblies and excluding all the classes/features that you do not need.
• Reducing (minifying) the size of the application’s XAP file, including XAP files of Windows Phone applications - the tool lets you optimize the size of all XAP files containing Telerik assemblies. Detailed log files are provided at the end of the process.
• Minifying the themes’ assemblies – the Telerik Minifier tool also works with the Themes assemblies by extracting only the styles that are needed for the controls you selected. Thus, all the redundant styles for other controls that you will not use in your application will be excluded. As a result, the Themes’ assembly size will be significantly reduced. The Telerik Minifier itself uses this feature and this way the Vista theme assembly is reduced from 2600+K to less than 400K (25% of the original size). And now it contains only the styles needed for the couple of controls used in the web UI of the application.
• Minifying theme Styles for standard controls - You are able to select even our theme Styles for the built-in Silverlight controls like CheckBox, RadioButton, PasswordBox, TextBox and so on. This way you can download assembly having themes only for those controls. The item in the main treeview of the Telerik Minifier is called “Silverlight Controls Styles”.