Question

I could use some help figuring out the best way to implement a “splash”/start-up page for my Silverlight 4 client applications that are built using Prism 2 and run out-of-browser.

I am supporting a suite of applications and am working on a common library of controls and services that all of the applications may use. As part of this, I am creating a subclass of the UnityBootstrapper class to register the services.

I’ve run into a situation where I need to ‘pre-load’ a couple of the services with data from the server on start-up. This could take a bit of time so we’d like to display a splash screen while all of the start-up steps are executed. Since we are running out-of-browser, I know this isn’t straight forward. Any help is appreciated.

I’m also open to other approaches for start-up data that can’t be ‘lazy loaded’.

Answer 1

So after many trials and errors, I’ve come up with the following approach that I am now working through to see how well it works.

I’ve created a Shell UserControl in my class library that acts as a wrapper (container) for the UI. I set this control as the RootVisual. Within the content of this control, I add my splash control/view and make all of the necessary startup service calls. Using WaitHandles, I wait until all of the calls have returned before replacing the splash control with the application’s start page.

The application has no idea how any of this works, which was my goal. They simply override a method I’ve added to the bootstrapper to make any startup service calls. The service calls are executed on a background thread and the code uses WaitHandle.WaitAll to block until all of the calls are completed which then uses Dispatcher.BeginInvoke to replace the splash with the application’s main page.

This all seems to work pretty well.