Currently I have a pure silverlight website with navigation. Im worried about the customers that are hitting the website and are leaving straight away because they are have to have the SL plugin installed and they also have to wait for the 1.5 meg xap file to download.
The first page of the silverlight application is the login/registration page where the user must login or register to proceed to any other page in the site. Im thinking about swapping this page out for an ASP.net MVC webpage. So when the user hits the site the first page loads up automatically (since it will be the ASP.net MVC part of the site) and as they are signing up or logging in, the silverlight app is downloading in the background, or if they dont have the plugin than i will handle it a bit more gracefully. Once they log in it will pass them over to the silverlight app.
Just wondering if anybody has gone down this root and has any advice on the subject?
Thanks in Advance
There are several approaches to this problem. I would be considering approaches to reduce the size of the initial Xap file by downloading additional components seperately. This blog is an example but there are plenty of others try variations of this web search: “dynamic download assembly MEF Silverlight”.
You would be seeking to have just enough in your initial Xap to display the logon screen. Meanwhile it could be performing a background download of your main page. You might even be able to go further with MEF in a navigation framework to further sub-divide your app so that the main page display doesn’t require the fully downloaded set either. Here is another more advanced blog on that subject.