Telerik Assembly Minifier - official release

What is Assembly Minifier

If you still don’t know what it is:

• You should first read my previous post, where I announced the first Beta version of the tool
• You can watch the “Introduction to Assembly Minifier” video, kindly provided by Todd Anglin and Telerik TV
• You can read “why Silverlight application size matters” (the xap file) and how Assembly Minifier helps you reduce the XAP file size - by Todd Anglin. Read more…
• You can go to http://minifier.telerik.com/,  get your reduced Silverlight assemblies, build your application's XAP file with the new assemblies and significantly improve your application performance and downloading experience

What is New in the Q2 2010 release?

Among the great Q2 release of RadControls for Silverlight and the tons of new features, we have also been working hard to bring you more stable and better Assembly Minifier tool.

There are a lot of features coming with the official version:

• We now support minifying the themes’ assemblies. Which means that you can now upload themes’ assemblies along with the controls and select the needed controls. At the end of the process you will get the new themes' assemblies having styles only for the controls you selected. The minifier client application uses this feature. As a result the Vista theme assembly was reduced from 2600+K to less then 400K (25% of the original size). And now the assembly contains only the styles for the couple of controls used in the Assembly Minifier UI.

Minifying Vista theme for the Minifier UI. Comparison to the original sizes

• The second major new feature is support for the Charting assembly. Furthermore we now split the control into separate features, so you will be able to choose which features you need for your project

Minifying chart components.

• We now support Feature Based Selection. Meaning that some controls have optional parts/features that you can select and at the end you will have even smaller control package, having only the needed parts/features
• With the new version you are able to select for minifying even our theme Styles for the built-in Silverlight controls like CheckBox, RadioButton, PaswordBox, TextBox and so on. Thus, you can download an assembly having only the themes for those controls. The item in the minifier's TreeView is called “Silverlight Controls Styles”
• We also made a lot of improvements and fixes in the main XAML processing module. The XAML is reduced much better and efficient, resulting in smaller size and more correct assemblies

What to expect from Assembly Minifier?

Just a little insights about what to expect from the Assembly Minifier in the future.

For the next Quarter, we will work hard to bring you better user experience. We will optimize the whole process, giving you much easier way to minimize your XAP files. We will also continue to work on improving the resulting assembly sizes and making our controls suite more “minification suitable”.

We will greatly appreciate your feedback and comments.