Home/ Questions/Q 5979047
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-22T21:36:15+00:00

I have a common silverlight project. This project project, among other things, includes constants

  • 0

I have a common silverlight project. This project project, among other things, includes constants and static classes.

The silverlight App i have references this common library.
In addition, i have a handful of external modules that are loaded on-demand (via Prism). Each module is its own .Xap file and they too reference the common library.

So now each Xap in my silverlight application has a reference to the Common.dll.
Does this mean the common.dll is loaded every time a xap is loaded, or does it essentially mean only the main App’s common.dll is ever loaded?

The ultimate question im getting at is this:
If i make a code change (bug fix) in the common.dll, do i have to release ALL Xap files or just the main App xap?

Thanks.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    By default DLLs are loaded on demand. This means that you can’t really guarantee which directory they will load from. This is a common issue among modular applications and one that there isn’t a ready prescription for. It depends on requirements, essentially.

    Some things you can do:

    1. GAC the Common.dll in the target environment. This will allow you to control the versioning of that DLL centrally.
    2. Release everything every time Common.dll changes (as you mentioned).

    We have opted for number 2 (we treat our “Common.dll” as a contract assembly that changes rarely) in order to keep our xcopy deployments intact.

    Number 1 might make more sense if you anticipate that code churn on Common.dll will be high or you want to keep your deployment schedules for modules completely autonomous (like if the modules were being developed and deployed by seperate teams with seperate build and source respositories, for example).

    Edit: It looks like Silverlight has something to provide an xcopy variant of the GAC approach. ChrisF’s answer is probably the way I would go with Silverlight (we do WPF, so that’s a bit different). I’ll leave this here for posterity.

    • 0