Before I disappear for a few days holiday over the Christmas period, I just wanted to leave you with a little “present” from the XAF team. Now, you may have already heard that we have planned a lot of improvements to the XAF Web UI for 2011, including web application performance optimization. We have already taken the first few steps in this direction and we’d love to share the results with you. We are excited to let you know that the XAF Web UI now supports the Lightweight Rendering Mode of our web controls! Check out Mehul’s blog for details of the benefits of this mode.
To make this work, the XAF team carried out deeper testing and fixed a lot of issues, however, we would still like to call it “beta” support in 10.2. Because of this, we would like to ask you to try it out in your own XAF web applications. Of course, we would love to hear your feedback and to fix any issues you may find. If all goes according to plan, we will enable the Lightweight Rendering Mode in XAF by default, in 2011.1. 
So How do You Turn it on?
You can enable this mode on in your Global.asax.cs code, for instance, using the following statement:
protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) {
DevExpress.ExpressApp.Web.RenderHelper.RenderMode =
DevExpress.Web.ASPxClasses.ControlRenderMode.Lightweight;
}
This switch turns on Lightweight Rendering Mode for all controls, as of this time, those are ASPxPageControl, ASPxNavBar and ASPxMenu.
What are benefits of This Mode?
Well, numbers showing the improvements are provided in the blog post above. In reality, it depends on your particular case, primarily on how many navigation items are in your application, how many tabbed groups in your views layout, how many nested views you are using, how many actions shown and so on. Using our MainDemo.Web application we have about 20% less traffic using Lightweight rendering mode. So, if you have a slow internet connection it is worth trying.
As always, we are eager to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Well that’s all we have for you this year. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s been a good year for XAF and we’ll be back next year to carry on the good work, so until then, happy XAFing and Merry Christmas