Multiply panels or forms?

[Guest Wavid]

Been woundering for a while if using multiply panels on a single form is faster or more benefical than using lots of forms. Wouldn't mind getting some other peoples opinions of the advantages and disadvantages

[Guest babybob]

No idea about the speed, but interested to find out.

From purely a dev view I would rather use multipleforms for 2 reasons:

1) The ide wysiwyg view would be unusable with multiple pannels

2) I believe that until you show a form it will not use any resources, whereas a hidden pannel is just not rendered to the screen it still uses resources

Any other comments?

Brian

www.bbpsoftware.co.uk

[Guest Wavid]

1) The ide wysiwyg view would be unusable with multiple pannels  

2) I believe that until you show a form it will not use any resources, whereas a hidden pannel is just not rendered to the screen it still uses resources

Yeah these are the 2 things ive come up with to.

1) I had the same problem at first. So in the design view i layed all the panels out next to each other so at runtime when i wanted a panel i called a method that moved it to 0,0 and moved it to the front.

2) This is the other thing i was thinking. It will take the form longer to load at first since everythign will be loaded. However like you say it would use more resources.

Think i might try using multiply forms see how it affects performance. Still wouldn't mind hearing other peoples views on the matter.

[Guest NeilC_MVP]

From a pure performance perspective, multiple forms is the way to go. Loading all the controls on all the panels at start-time is not going to do you startup time any favours. Also, as it is so rightly pointed out, loading all the controls at start-up will consume vital resources when it's unnecessary.

Funnily, this is actually the same feature that I'm dealing with at work right now. I'm using a strongly-typed stack with a capacity threshold to manage form navigation. The threshold limits the number of forms I can have open (which is what I need). Also, the strongly typed nature of the stack elimates unnecessary boxing/unboxing. Two pluses for perf :lol: