WPF Best way of displaying a busy indicator when dynamically creating a page

Question

I have a WPF application that runs as an XBAP in a browser. On a few pages all the controls are dynamically created depending on what the user selects. Because of this it can look like the application is not doing anything until all the controls are loaded. I'd like to have some sort of busy indicator displayed before hand to show the user that the controls are loading, it doesn't have to be animated although would be nice if it did. I've looked into the telerik busy indicator but this doesn't work as it's really for getting data for a single control and doesn't show until the controls are loaded which defeats the purpose.

I was thinking of displaying an overlay, or something similar, first, containing a loading logo, then load the page behind this and hide the overlay when the controls have loaded. I was wondering if this was the best way of going about this or if there's a better way?

Answer 1

Note: I haven't tried this in a XBAP browser app, but it works in WPF Apps without any problems! I use a DispatcherTimer to show an hourglass when necessary, and abstract this code to a static class.

public static class UiServices
{

    /// <summary>
    ///   A value indicating whether the UI is currently busy
    /// </summary>
    private static bool IsBusy;

    /// <summary>
    /// Sets the busystate as busy.
    /// </summary>
    public static void SetBusyState()
    {
        SetBusyState(true);
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Sets the busystate to busy or not busy.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="busy">if set to <c>true</c> the application is now busy.</param>
    private static void SetBusyState(bool busy)
    {
        if (busy != IsBusy)
        {
            IsBusy = busy;
            Mouse.OverrideCursor = busy ? Cursors.Wait : null;

            if (IsBusy)
            {
                new DispatcherTimer(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0), DispatcherPriority.ApplicationIdle, dispatcherTimer_Tick, Application.Current.Dispatcher);
            }
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Handles the Tick event of the dispatcherTimer control.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="sender">The source of the event.</param>
    /// <param name="e">The <see cref="System.EventArgs"/> instance containing the event data.</param>
    private static void dispatcherTimer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        var dispatcherTimer = sender as DispatcherTimer;
        if (dispatcherTimer != null)
        {
            SetBusyState(false);
            dispatcherTimer.Stop();
        }
    }
}

You would use it like this:

void DoSomething()
{
    UiServices.SetBusyState();
    // Do your thing
}

Hope this helps!