I’ve just downloaded and ran the Sparkle January CTP. Congratulations to the Interactive Designer team for their first public release!
One of the first things that was noticed was the start up time took ages – well at first. Subsequent runs came up quickly (around 2 seconds on an Athlon XP 3200). To reproduce the slow startup, the machine had to be rebooted and Sparkle took around 23 seconds to start. There’s obviously a bunch of DLL caching going on as per usual with Windows – but the difference in startup time seems even more pronounced that a typical Windows app. The install directory for Sparkle January CTP shows up a ton of really tiny DLLs, which is surprising since I thought that the current wisdom is that fewer larger DLLs is better for startup performance. This is probably just a temporary scenario for the CTPs.
It would be great if the Sparkle development team could comment on WPF application design from a performance perspective and some of the design/deployment decisions and tradeoffs made while developing a decent size WPF application such as Sparkle. One of the issues moving to a newer software technology historically is that it always seems to need bigger processors, more memory etc. This makes it more difficult to get users to upgrade regardless of the benefits to developers (self centered as we are). Getting some .NET/WinFX performance related feedback relating to the first publicly available “largish” WPF application that I know of would be invaluable.
PS: Yes I’m calling it Sparkle. It just takes too long to type Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer!