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We suppose you have already read the Q2 2012 Announcement blog for WinForms and have noticed the three new great controls that we developed for you – RadChartView, RadAutoCompleteBox and RadTextBoxControl. We also feel, however, that one of the big new things about Q2 2012 may remain unnoticed in the bunch of innovations. Therefore, we decided to dedicate a separate blog post to it. This improvement concerns one of the most important things for each and every application – performance. Namely, in our latest release we introduced a new and improved theming engine. It minimizes the startup time for your application and lowers its memory consumption. This could come in handy if you plan to deploy your applications on one of those fancy Windows 8 tablets (expected to be available by the end of the year) where applications created with RadControls for WinForms already feel native.

But let’s get to the facts. First, we chose to test the ThemeViewer tool which is included in our distribution. This tool uses all major controls such as RadGridView, RadDock and RadScheduler. When using version Q1 2012 SP1 the application consumes 198 megabytes of memory and initializes all themes for 7.2 seconds. This loading time, however, is not noticeable, because we load the themes in a separate thread. With Q2 2012 this is not necessary, because the same application takes only 70 Mb and loads for 3.2 seconds!

ThemeViewer Loading Time Optimizations 

Let’s do one more test: a sample application containing only a RadGridView and a custom theme takes 48 megabytes when used with Q1 2012 SP1. The same application takes 33 Mb in Q2 2012. If we load all eleven themes included in our distribution, the application will take 149 Mb and will load for 6 seconds in Q1 2012 SP1. Doing the same does not increase the consumed memory in Q2 2012; the application still takes 33 Mb and loads for 1.35 seconds.

Sample RadControls application performance optimizations

During the past there were cases where huge applications created with RadControls for WinForms took 30 seconds to load. One such case is when the application lives as a plugin inside Microsoft Outlook and uses custom themes. This issue is solved with the new theme engine.

Check also the other new features available in Q2 2012:

We are sure you will like our new release. As always, your feedback will be highly appreciated.

Download RadControls for WinForms by Telerik


About the Author

Nikolay Diyanov

Diyanov is the Product Manager of the Native Mobile UI division at Progress. Delivering outstanding solutions that make developers' lives easier is his passion and the biggest reward in his work. In his spare time, Nikolay enjoys travelling around the world, hiking, sun-bathing and kite-surfing.

Find him on Twitter @n_diyanov or on LinkedIn.

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