WPF Performance Degradation During UI Render

I have the following components in a WPF application:

(1) Window

(2) ContentPresenter in the开发者_开发问答 Window that is bound to a property in the underlying ViewModel. This Property references another ViewModel.

(3) A DataTemplate for the ViewModel that will be bound to the ContentPresenter referenced above. This data template instantiates a third-party grid that displays some data.

Whenever the ContentPresenter renders the data from the DataTemplate, it takes approximately three to four seconds for the UI to render. This causes the UI to hang for the duration of the time that it takes to render the content. Since I have little to no control over how the third-party control renders itself - my question involves whether or not it is possible to render content in a way that the UI will not hang.

Please advise.

Thanks.

Chris

How many rows is the grid displaying? And how many of those rows are visible on screen?

I'm asking because it's possible that you've got a UI layout that defeats virtualization. Usually, controls that show a scrollable list of data will perform virtualization. (The built-in ListBox does this, and any 3rd party grid of tolerable quality should do the same.) This is critical for performance, because it means your UI only needs to instantiate those items that are actually visible, rather than everything in your list.

But it's relatively easy to defeat this virtualization by accident. One way is to wrap the list or grid control in a ScrollViewer. You need virtualizing controls to be able to manage their own scrolling for virtualization to work, so the scrolling needs to happen on the inside. Wrapping a control in a ScrollViewer prevents it from doing its own scrolling. Another way it can go wrong is if you plug in a different ItemsPanel. A third possibility is that your list/grid control actually needs to be told to use virtualization.

But if you're using a control that simply takes a long time to render just the stuff you need to show on screen, then there's not much you can do - you'd need to contact the control vendor, or consider using a different vendor...