Telerik blogs

Last Friday we announced the availability of the first service pack of RadControls for WinForms Q3 2007. As always, the service pack fixes many issues that have been reported to Telerik since the Q3 2007 release in December.

More important, however, are the performance improvements in RadListBox and RadComboBox that this patch introduces. Sticking to the Telerik quality slogan, we wanted to deliver a new and improved RadListBox control (also used in RadComboBox) to meet the high and demanding requirements of our customers.

If you have been keeping track of the development of our WinForms suite, you would know that our development focus has shifted towards providing a new level of usability, targeting ease of use and high performance. We started this process in Q2 2007 (September 2007) when we supercharged our RadTreeView for WinForms by adding layout improvements and virtualization. These enhancements gave it a significant performance boost - it became more than 3 times faster than the standard treeview component with large amount of nodes (when tested with 50,000 items).

This time we concentrated on RadListBox by focusing on similar layout improvements, UI virtualization, and optimizations in the process of adding and removing items in the hierarchy (if you are interested in the optimization details, please drop me a line here and I will post them for you). The end results are remarkable: 

  • Loading 800 items under Win XP, Pentium4 2.67Ghz, 1.5GB RAM the new ListBox loads in just 0.1 seconds, which is 130 times faster than before! 
  • 2,000 items are loaded in 0.16 seconds and 
  • 5,000 items in an impressive 0.67 seconds!

We are still slightly slower than the standard Listbox, but we ran out for time for more improvements. I am sure our experienced developers will find a way to get us over closer to the performance of the standard component in the next version.

The next component which will get these improvements is RadGridView. Expect the first beta of RadGridView Q1 2008 to be announced in the WinForms Forums later this week. To learn more on the work being done on the GridView, please see Re-engineering RadGridView for WinForms (part I) and Re-engineering RadGridView for WinForms (part II).

To download SP1 of RadControls for WinForms log into your Telerik account and go to My Licenses.


Comments

Comments are disabled in preview mode.