Using the KryptonDataGridView can be a little frustrating because it does flicker quite badly when you alter the contents. You can see this clearly by using the control example from the Krypton Explorer that is placed on your desktop after installing. Starting up you get the following initial view…

And when you press the button to set the cells to random colors you get this update…

The problem is the horrible flicker you get as you can see the individual cells are updated. There is not much I can do about the poor performance as this is inherent in the base DataGridView that Krypton derives from. But I have managed to get rid of the flicker so at least it gives a reasonable transition from the users perspective.

Another control that tends to show some flicker is the KryptonHeaderGroup but for different reasons. In this case you notice the bottom header shown in the wrong place for a tiny fraction of a second as the control is resized. After investigating this issue turns out to be the operating system and not Krypton.

When you resize a control the OS is bit blit moving the pixels of the control before later asking the control to repaint. This automatic bit blitting is an issue because it moves the pixels of the bottom header to a place which we do not want them. Still, I managed to create a kludge to get around this. I place a top level transparent window over the control whilst its size changes so that you cannot see this incorrect transition phase. It works fine but I am not sure if it will cause a performance issue when you have many instances on the same form. Basic testing showed it was fine but time will tell when developers use it in real scenarios.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under Krypton Toolkit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.