Optimizing the load size of Telerik Silverlight controls

Following the expansion of our Silverlight suite (more than 15 controls coming out next week) and the feedback we’ve got from the community, we are now in a process of optimizing the size of the assemblies.

Instead of including all our controls into one big assembly, we decided to group them into several smaller ones. This will reduce the size of the XAP file when you are not using all the controls in the suite. We came up with the following list of assemblies:

• Telerik.Windows.UI.dll
• Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation.dll
• Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input.dll
• Telerik.Windows.Controls.Web.dll

Apart from this list there will be assemblies that hold the themes of the controls - e.g. separate assemblies for the Telerik, Vista and Default themes.

 

I want to emphasize, that the separation of the assemblies will neither lead to more requests to the server,nor it will affect the deployment of your application. This is due to the fact that Silverlight apps are deployed as a single XAP file that contains all the needed assembly references and resources. 

We would greatly appreciate your feedback about this change.  Drop us a line and let us know what you prefer - one monolithic assembly, or separate assemblies for every control. We will implement the above mentioned change in the next couple of days. Any suggestions and comments are welcome.