…thoughts on software development

Andy mentioned today some things to consider that I didn’t know about. When considering load time of mobile applications here’s a couple of things to keep in mind:

• The runtime validates the EXE by doing a hash. Each 1MB will therefore effectively add seconds to load time. Reducing the exe file size is thus a good thing.
• So how to reduce exe file size? IL doesnt add much to the footprint but embedded resources does. So keep them bitmaps in separate files will ya.
• Also, strong naming the exe forces the runtime to do additional validation without giving you a lot of security payback. Strong name only DLLs going into the GAC. 

And yes, those bitmaps I mentioned? Load them behind the scenes, off the main thread, e.g. using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem…