ComponentOne has several great products that target Silverlight Developers. One of them is their Silverlight Controls and the other is the XAP Optimizer. I decided that I would check out the controls and Xap Optimizer and feature them on my blog. After talking with ComponentOne, they agreed to take part in my Monthly Silverlight giveaway. The details are listed below:

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Win a FREE developer’s license of ComponentOne Silverlight Controls + XAP Optimizer! (the winner also gets a license to Silverlight Spy)

Random winner will be announced on March 1st, 2011!

To be entered into the contest do the following things:

1. Subscribe to my feed.
2. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.)
3. Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump and @ComponentOne http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 !
   Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page.

Don’t forget to visit ComponentOne because they made this possible.

MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net .

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Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark:

• The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here.
• The XAP Optimizer page is here.

One thing that I liked about the help documentation is that you can grab a PDF that only contains documentation for that control. This allows you to get the information you need without going through several hundred pages. You can also download the full documentation from their site. 

ComponentOne Silverlight Controls

I recently built a hobby project and decided to use ComponentOne Silverlight Controls. The main reason for this is that the controls are heavily documented, they look great and getting help was just a tweet or forum click away.

So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below.

I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most.

1) ComponentOne’s Image Control – Display animated GIF images on your Silverlight pages as you would in traditional Web apps. Add attractive visuals with minimal effort.

2) HTML Host - Render HTML and arbitrary URI content from within Silverlight.

3) Chart3D - Create 3D surface charts with options for contour levels, zones, a chart legend and more.

4) PDFViewer - View PDF files in Silverlight!

That is just a fraction of the controls available. If you want to check out several of them in a “real” application then check out my Silverlight page at http://michaelcrump.info.

This brings me to the second part of the giveaway.

XAP Optimizer – Is designed to reduce the size of your XAP File. It also includes built-in obfuscation and signing.

With my personal project, I decided to use the XAP Optimizer by ComponentOne. It was so easy to use. You basically give it your .XAP file and it provides an output file.

If you prefer to prune unused references manually then you can prune your XAP file manually by selecting the option below.

I went ahead and added Obfuscation just to try it out and it worked great. You may notice from the screenshot below that I only obfuscated assemblies that I built. The other dlls anyone can grab off the net so we have no reason to obfuscate them.

You also have the option to automatically sign your .xap with the SN.exe tool.

So how did it turn out?

Well, I reduced my XAP size from 2.4 to 1.8 with simply a click of a button.

I added obfuscation with a click of a button:

Screenshot of no obfuscation on my XAP File

 

Screenshot of obfuscation on my XAP File with XAP Optimizer.

 

So, with 2 button clicks, I reduce my XAP file and obfuscated my assembly. What else can you want? Well, they provide a nice HTML report that gives you an optimization summary.

So what if you don’t want to launch this tool every time you deploy a Silverlight application? Well the official documentation provided a way to do it in your built event in Visual Studio.

Click the Build Events tab on the left side of the Properties window.

Enter the following command in the Post-build event command line:

$Program Files\ComponentOne\XapOptimizer\XapOptimizer.exe /cmd /p:$(ProjectDir)$(ProjectName).xoproj

In the end, this is a great product. I love code that I don’t have to write and utilities that just work. ComponentOne delivers with both the Silverlight Controls and the XAP Optimizer.

Don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win a set of the controls!

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