Preload all assemblies (JIT)

Question

We are taking a hit the first time some heavy UI screens are loaded. Our project is divided into one main executable and several DLL files. The DLL files can also contain UI

Answer 1

You can use NGen on any machine - there is no notion of "development enviroment" in CLR... When you use it make sure that NGen'ed images are actually used (see Native Image Generator (Ngen.exe) for instructions and look for FusLogVw note in the document).

You can also pre-JIT through invoking all the code you expect to run (as Davita suggested), but you'll need to invoke each and every method of all classes which in not exactly practical.

You should profile your application to see where time is actually spent - it could be reading of the assemblies from the disk, not JITing itself... You can roughly see it by starting the application, looking at the forms, closing the application and repeating steps. If the second run is much faster then the application spends most of the time reading from the disk, not JITing.