Designing forms with many controls

[Mohammad Hashemian]

Hello
In writing an application I should design an options form like the MS
Office Options form. this form has too many controls in some tab pages.
the problem is when I add these controls to the form, the form's load
speed and moving between tab pages will be reduced too much. I want to
know what's the best way to designing this types of forms?
thanks.

 

[Marc Gravell]

I would tend to design each large tab page as a user control that I
load on-the-fly as the user changes tabs (i.e. load it when first
needed, then keep it until he form dies). It also segregates the
development, but needs a common way of talking back to the main form.
It makes it harder to do designer-based data-binding on the tabs,
though, as you will probably want to share the single data-source (and
currency manager) between the main form and all tabs - it can be done
if you do your data-binding in code, though.

Also - note that the debugger can make forms looks slower than they
are; try it in release mode called from the exe itself (don't hit
"play"). Other than that, general performance rules apply - so I would
scatter some performance metrics through the page to see which controls
are eating the time, and then spend some time optimising them -
minimising nested loops, using Dictionary/HashTable lookups, etc.

Marc

 

[Mohammad Hashemian]

thanks Marc for your attention,
So you say that if there isn't any relation between tab page's controls
and form and it hasn't any data binding, it's better to insert controls
on a user control and then insert that at form?
is this way has much effects on form's performance?