Smaller is still better! [A simple step continues to shrink the download size of Silverlight 2 applications]
A few months ago, I looked at the size of Silverlight 2 XAP files and blogged a simple way to reduce the size of typical XAP files by about 22%. Silverlight 2 was still under development at the time and a lot of work has gone on since then (including the official release of Silverlight 2!). I wanted to revisit this topic to see if my XapReZip script was still worth running, or if it had been rendered useless by better default compression behavior for the Silverlight Tools package. I just ran XapReZip against three of the same scenarios as last time - here's the new data for sizes of the resulting XAP files:
| Scenario | Starting Size | After XapReZip | Difference | Reduction |
| New Silverlight Project | 4,365 | 3,491 | 874 | 20% |
| ... with DatePicker | 88,047 | 68,760 | 19,287 | 22% |
| ... and DataGrid | 216,368 | 170,217 | 46,151 | 21% |
The results are nearly identical to what they were back in July when I first blogged about XapReZip, so the issue of sub-optimal default compression still seems to be with us. :( But the good news is that my original XapReZip script works just as well today as it did before! :) And even better news is that other folks have taken things a step further and written tools to make this even easier. Here's a post by Rob Houweling where he shares his ReXapper tool (a compiled, self-contained version of the same process). And here's a post I've just found by Valeri Hristov that uses 7-Zip - and appears to pre-date my original XapReZip post!
Keeping download size small helps get content to your users as quickly as possible - and satisfying users is always important! Please consider adding a re-compression step to your Silverlight 2 project today; your users - and download costs - will thank you. :)