I have been playing a bit with Silverlight and try to port my Silverlight 3.0 application to Silverlight 4.0. My application loads different XAP files and upon a user request create an instance of a Xaml user control and adds it to the main container, in a sort of MEF approach in order I can have an extensible and pluggable application.

The application is pretty huge and to keep acceptable the performances and the initial loading I have built up some helper classes to load in the background all pages and user controls that might be used later on.

On Silverlight 3.0 everything was running smoothly without any problem so far. Switching to SL 4.0 I have noticed that when the process approaches to create the instances of the user controls using Activator.CreateInstance, the layout freezes unexpectedly for a minute and sometimes for more. Looking at the task manager the memory usage of IE jumps from 50MB to 400MB and sometimes to 1.5 GB.

If the process won't take that much the layout is rendered properly and the memory falls back to 50 MB. Otherwise everything crashes due to out of memory exeption. Does anybody encountered the same problem? Or has anybody a solution about this tricky issue?