Tips for Silverlight Developers / Tutorials

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate. – Thomas Jones

I’ve downloaded some very simple “one page” zipped or rar-ed Silverlight demos that were 1MB and larger. If you remove all the .dll and .pdb files from such a solution, you save about 2.5 MB before you compress it. If you use tools like Resharper, and you remove all the Resharper – related files, you’ll save even more.  Remember, not everybody uses Resharper!

The last one I downloaded was a one -pager Silverlight .rar that weighed in at nearly 1 MB. It also had the Resharper files in it. After I did the above cleanups and re-rared it, it was only 43Kb! D00ds! Almost 1 MB vs only 43K after cleanup!

When you load and build one of these  “cleaned up” demo or tutorial solutions like this, all of the assemblies and pdb files will be regenerated perfectly. You do not need to distribute all this baggage with your demo!

Computers run on electricity. And electricity comes from coal, oil, or gas (and sometimes the hot air from Congress).  Save the bandwidth and the planet!  You may not believe in global warming, but you know what? They say you become a conservative once you have something to conserve.

On a related note, lots of cool people have been "ittifying" their url links to Silverlight Resources at my "playground" site, IttyUrl.net. This is a "Social Short Urls" kind of hybrid site that I originally developed for my own use and then realized it would be better to make it public. There are some new features I've added:

1) All new "Ittified" urls are also posted to the Twitter account here.

2) On the right pane, there are two new links, "Silverlight Latest Posts" and "Silverlight Forum Posts" which bring up popup JQuery-powered scrolling windows featuring last 12 hours blog post search on "Silverlight" and the Active Forum posts from the Silverlight.net forum respectively.

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