Silverlight 2.0 Compression Rate

Friday, January 2, 2009

After a short discussion in silverlight forums with a guy who have only 19kb line, I checked out compression for XAP files. A XAP is a zipped package of DLL’s and resources. With winrar installed you can open by context menu from Visual Studio Explorer the xap (clientbin). It contains files like

The size of the package in this case is 750 KB. I unzipped the content and compressed it with Winrar again and- surprise- surprise, package size is now 547 KB. A reduction more than 35%. Only rename the zip back to xap.

I will investigate a little bit, how to automate that within the build process.

4 Comments

You compressed files into xap file with Winrar and change the extension to xap and the Browser recognized? Witch Winrar extension did you use, *.rar or *.zip legacy?

Vitor Canova - Friday, January 2, 2009 5:09:46 PM

Very interesting, but does this have an effect on decompression times? In that case a balance between bandwith and cpu speed becomes important.

Jonathan van de Veen - Monday, January 5, 2009 6:59:23 AM

Yeah we use a simple batch file using 7zip to rezip the files.

dealer inventory management guy - Tuesday, January 6, 2009 1:31:16 AM

Silverlight 2 0 compression rate.. WTF? :)

weblogs.asp.net - Thursday, April 7, 2011 4:38:35 PM

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