Is it possible to preload an assembly in Windows Phone 7? - windows-phone-7

Question

I have an app in which I have a lot of references and the load time was not acceptable to me. I have removed the splash screen image and created an animated loading screen by having a separate project with no reference to the main application which then navigates to the first page of the rest of the app. It does start up fast now but it's a little lacking still.
I would like to do another animation right before the load screen goes away. The only way I can think of to do this is to actually preload the assemblies needed for the navigation to the next page, do an animation, and then navigate.
I have tried
OnNavigatedFrom but the animation doesn't have time to run since the page will be replaced by the new page very quickly from that point.
OnNavigatingFrom is no help either as it is called as soon as I call NavigationService.Navigate();
Searching the web and Stack Overflow :)
I also considered faking it a bit by having the next page show a duplicate of the load screen and do the last animation there, but it can't match the current state of the load screen animation and is harder to maintain
Thanks for any ideas!

Answer 1

If you want to force the loading of an assembly, just reference a type from this assembly.
For instance, something like Console.WriteLine(typeof(YourAssembly.SomeType)); will force the loading of YourAssembly.
Now for your problem, maybe you can use usercontrols? Put the content of your main page in a user control. Display the loading page, create the usercontrol in the background, let the animation play, then when the animation is done playing replace the page's content with the usercontrol.

Answer 2

It turns out that you can preload by just creating a new instance of the page you are going to navigate to. Unfortunately that has to be done on the UI thread which can cause animation slowdown, at least in my experience.
Here is a sample of how to do an animation, then preload, then do another animation before navigating. :
public partial class LoadScreen : PhoneApplicationPage
{
public LoadScreen()
{
InitializeComponent();
this.Loaded += OnLoaded;
}
private void OnLoaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs routedEventArgs)
{
var sb = new Storyboard();
// create your animation here
sb.Completed += (sender, args) => PreLoad();
sb.Begin();
}
private void PreLoad()
{
// this is the part that actually takes time and causes things to get loaded
// you may need it in a try/catch block depending on what is in your constructor
var page = new PageToNavigateTo();
// now create an animation at the end of which we navigate away
var sbOut = new Storyboard();
// create your animation here
sbOut.Completed += (sender, args) => NavigateToNextScreen();
sbOut.Begin();
}
private void NavigateToNextScreen()
{
// navigate here
}
protected override void OnNavigatedFrom(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e)
{
base.OnNavigatedFrom(e);
// remove the loading screen from the backstack so the user doesn't see it again when hitting the back button
NavigationService.RemoveBackEntry();
}
}