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 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 up to 1.5 GB.

If the process won't take that much the layout is rendered properly even though the memory usage is still extremely high. Otherwise everything crashes due to out of memory exception.

Running the same application compiled in SL3, the memory used is about 200MB when all the usercontrols are loaded. Time spent to load the application in SL3 is about 10 seconds, while it takes up to 3 mins in SL4 There are no transparencies, no opacities set, no effects and animations in the layout.

User controls are instantied on the fly and added or removed in the visual tree on purpose when the user switches from one screen to another. The resources are all cleaned properly when a usercontrol is removed from the visual tree to allow the GC to operate in the background.

I may do something wrong but I could not figure out where exactly nail out the source of this problem. As far as I know there is no memory profiler in SL4 that can help me out to find where to look at. But again I could not be updated on new debugging tools available.