WPF column resize performance issues

Question

Are there in general any known performance issues in WPF related to grid column resizing?

I have an application where I need to do some particular things in a column, but for all the different solutions I find the column resizing gets slow. This applies when I have typically more than 1000 elements in my list, but I assume this isn't too much for WPF..? So; the general question is whether you've experienced slow column resizing, and whether you've found solutions for this? What was causing it?

Some more details about my particular case:

I can have two different things in my columns; ComboBox or TextBlock. The ComboBox should fill the whole column and follow on column resize, and clicking an empty area of a column with a TextBlock should select the row. This is where the problem is. For all solutions I have to this the column resizing gets slow. The only way to make resizing smooth that I've found is by adding a StackPanel outside them with Orientation="Horizontal", but with this I'm unable to achieve the styles described above.

Here are some observations:

• Adding style HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" to the items of the list makes the ComboBoxes stretch and the TextBlocks clickable, but also column resize slow.
• Adding Background="Transparent" to either the StackPanel or the elements that are inserted inside them solves the problem too, but makes resizing slow.
• Adding an outer StackPanel with property Orientation="Horizontal" makes resizing smooth, but I'm unable to apply the styles as described.

Answer 1

Have you tried virtualizing the elements in the ListView? When you are virtualizing, the virtualizing panel only creates the visuals for the elements that are in the view. This allows you to have large numbers of items without performance issues like you mention. See VirtualizingStackPanel for more details. Also The Layout System. You can create your own virtualizing panels. If you look up "virtualizing+wpf" on google you'll find lots of hits for virtualizing Canvases, WrapPanels, and etc.

I hope this helps.