Silverlight Upload control just got better

We are now in the middle between the Beta release of the Q2.2010 and the official one which will be available for download very soon. For the ones that missed the beta release - see the silverlight samples online.

One of the major tasks for my team was to optimize the way the Rad Upload component for Silverlight is working. We separated our work in two main directions - improve the performance of the control and take advantage of the Silverlight4 features.

The most requested feature from Silverlight 4 was to integrate the drag and drop support from the file system into the Rad Upload. Now you can select a single file, or many files if you want, from your favorite directory explorer application, and drop them directly into the Rad Upload control that is hosted in the browser. The upload control will get populated with the dropped files as if they were selected via the browse button. We also added a new helper control - RadUploadDropPanel - that will allow you to define a drop zone and when the users drop the files into this zone the upload will get populated automatically!

The other direction where we invested our efforts was to improve the performance of the control. We implemented two major changes in this direction:

1. Now we don't use base64 encoding in order to send the files in chunks. We use plain File fields for the Post request. This change itself boost the performance of the upload component with about 30% due to the less traffic we make with each request.
2. The second improvement was to group the smaller files into a single post request. So now if you have a Post request size set to say 2Mb (via the BufferSize property) and users select 200 images with size 10k we will send them all with a single request to the server, instead of making 200 requests for each image. This improves the user experience a lot - the upload of the image is much faster, but the other important aspect of this change is that the web server that you are using to process the uploaded files receives a lot less requests - thus your server load will be much less now.

What's next for the Rad Upload control? The RadUpload is one of the most mature controls from our Silverlight suite. It is available since version 1.1 of the SL framework and the only thing that is left is to allow a programmatic upload of a given file stream. We are open for feedback and if you have any feature request or if you think that something can be done better - please don't hesitate to contact us!