How to improve the performance of windows form designer in big forms?-CodePudding

Where i'm working i have found an application with a big form that has a tabcontrol and 14 tabpages, every tabpage has a lot of controls and panels that overlap each other, this makes windows form designer really slow. It takes 1 minute to save and over 10 seconds to change a tabpage and change a textbox property.

I tried to separate the tabpages in smaller forms and call the forms as children of a tabpage to create the illusion of the tabpages being in the same form, but that didn't work, because when i load the form into a tabpage then all sizes and locations are messed up.

There is a way to improve the performance of the windows form designer without changing drastically the way the application works?

CodePudding user response：

Create 14 UserControls and resize the tab control to only show the tabs header and place a Panel as placeholder below the tab control. Then when a tab page is selected dynamically add one of the user controls to the panel with docking set to Fill.

public Form1()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    SelectUserControl();
}

private void TabControl1_Selected(object sender, TabControlEventArgs e)
{
    SelectUserControl();
}

private void SelectUserControl()
{
    UserControl? uc = (tabControl1.SelectedIndex   1) switch {
        1 => new UserControl1(),
        2 => new UserControl2(),
        3 => new UserControl3(),
        ...
        14 => new UserControl14(),
        _ => null
    };
    if (uc is not null) {
        while (panel1.Controls.Count > 0) {
            panel1.Controls[0].Dispose();
        }
        uc.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
        panel1.Controls.Add(uc);
    }
}

Of course you will have add code to load and save values when the user control changes or to set the Data Binding source.

But if you say that it takes 1 minute to save, then maybe your saving procedure is suboptimal.