More Silverlight

First, thought this platform comparison (Silverlight v Flash) was interesting - not sure how complete it is thought (and it's a bit early to claim Silverlight has a "Robust video publishing tools and third-party ecosystem" but Flash does not. Thought the SEO angle was interesting (wonder how many engines do follow links to "Xaml-behind", and not sure 'DRM' is a feature everyone likes.

Anyway, the saga of RaceReplay continues... after getting race splits (mostly) working I decided to give Silverlight a 'stress test' by loading all 400 competitors into the simulation (warning: the Xaml-behind is 7Mb, so loading may take a while).

The first thing that came to mind was "that Xaml is too big!". One way to solve this will be to send the animation data via JSON and pump Xaml from Javascript into Silverlight - pretty sure that will be a lot less verbose than repeated

While googling for other options, it turns out Silverlight also supports the ZIP format. The post suggests using it to package images, but ZIPping up Xaml (text/xml) would surely show much better compression gains - my 7Mb animation canvas compresses to 576kb, so now all I need to do is figure out if it's possible to extract and inject it into the Xaml DOM. Will see how that goes - the City2Surf has 60,000 runners (wonder how close Silverlight will get to animating those...)