[RESOLVED] What is the overhead for .DLL's?

[DeanMc]

Hi Guys,

So I have been developing do different applications that seem to share a lot of the same features. Currently I am copy and pasting classes into each one rather than using .DLL's.

This lead me to wonder, if designed right a lot of my code could be packaged in .DLL's and used as blocks to build an application.

What sort of overhead is there to this method, does it slow the application down? It would be nice to have a small data base of DLL's that I could just copy to the solution and have insta functionality!

[RhinoBull]

If you developed ,your dll using the same technology as your "main" project (say .Net framework) then imho overhead is second to none.
If you however used some additional libraries then they will have to be referenced in order to fully support component's funcmtionalities - that's pretty much the overhead.
Memory usage will probably be a bit more but who cares about those things anymore?

[si_the_geek]

As a general rule the time cost is in getting the DLL loaded (which will be a one off), and the actual calling of the methods (once started, they will be run at the normal speed).

If routines need to be called repeatedly in a time-sensitive loop, the difference might be a problem - otherwise it should be fine.

[DeanMc]

The only reason was concerned was because I am developing for silverlight which is still a bit of a pig for memory. I haven't any code that is time sensitive or resource hungry but I will keep a note of that!

Thanks guys, reps all round!