Reduce your XAP file size in seconds

Want to make your Silverlight XAP packages smaller? It couldn’t be easier!

Extract the XAP file (rename to .ZIP and use any extractor). Then… re-compress it using a good ZIP tool, like WinRAR.

Third party zippers are far more efficient than the one built in to Visual Studio.

In my trial, I got a 280k file down to 220k!

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 10:34 am and is filed under Silverlight, Visual Studio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “Reduce your XAP file size in seconds”

  1. Justin-Josef Angel Says:
    October 31, 2008 at 3:31 pm | Reply

    Have you actually tried loading it up in a webpage after you rezipped it?
    Rezipping it might save bandwidth, but were you actually manage to serve the XAP file and have Silverlight load it up again?

    It takes more than WinRar if memory servers.
    David has an excellent post on this:
    http://blogs.msdn.com/delay/archive/2008/07/16/smaller-is-better-a-simple-step-to-shrink-the-download-size-of-silverlight-2-applications.aspx

    – Justin

  2. Jordan Says:
    October 31, 2008 at 5:41 pm | Reply

    Hey there,

    Naturally I tested this before posting :) . I don’t RAR the files… I use WinRAR to Zip them (with the “Best” compression setting).

    The article you linked to is very good BTW!

  3. tswcbyy20 Says:
    October 31, 2008 at 8:00 pm | Reply

    Very good

  4. Devin Rose Says:
    November 1, 2008 at 4:19 am | Reply

    One thing I noticed when Silverlight 2 released was that my xap binary went from 624 KB (built with the beta 2) to about 450 KB with the released version.

    Squeezing out another 20% would be cool, too, using this idea!

  5. Jordan Says:
    November 1, 2008 at 12:02 pm | Reply

    Hey Devin,

    I wonder if the improvement is better compression or if the RTW version produces smaller files (some debugging code removed etc)…

  6. Silverlight Cream for October 31, 2008 -- #415 Says:
    November 4, 2008 at 9:14 am | Reply

    [...] Reduce your XAP size in seconds [...]

  7. leovernazza Says:
    January 31, 2009 at 4:48 am | Reply

    Hi, or you can just use the ComponentOne XapOptimizer (it also removes the unused classes and xaml resources from your xap file)

    http://demo.ComponentOne.com/Silverlight/XapOptimizer

    Regards

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