WPF Designer Performance

patearl · Post by **patearl** » Thu Sep 02, 2010 1:05 am

Greetings. We've been experiencing abysmal performance with the WPF designer... so much so that our client considers it to be useless. We're passing in business objects that have large object graphs. We've set the max object depth to a small number, but we're not sure if it's doing anything. I've produced a profile trace of the designer loading one of our reports. Can you explain why it might be so slow and how we can make it perform reasonably?

Trace (path 1)
Trace (path 2)

Resolving this is something of an urgent matter for us. Much client pressure.

Post by **Alex K.** » Fri Sep 03, 2010 6:24 am

Hello,

We work hard on this problem and do our best to do it as fast as possible. We will let you know when the solution is available.

Thank you.

patearl · Post by **patearl** » Fri Sep 03, 2010 12:54 pm

Thank you. Your initiative is much appreciated.

Post by **Andrew** » Mon Sep 06, 2010 2:26 am

Hello,

We have added the mode of caching icons in Dictionary. This makes the process of creating the tree much faster.
Please use the StiOptions.Designer.DictionaryIconsCaching property (by default, it is set to true).

Thank you.

patearl · Post by **patearl** » Mon Sep 06, 2010 4:03 pm

Many thanks for improving the performance situation there.

I'm not sure where to get the version with these fixes. Will there be another prerelease soon?

patearl · Post by **patearl** » Tue Sep 07, 2010 5:24 pm

Well, I'm not sure if the situation has improved any, but the profiler results did. I've included the results from double-clicking on a data field in the same report. After double-clicking, the designer seems to just sit around forever. Maybe it finishes, but I never waited to find out. Here's a trace of several minutes of activity.

Trace with 2010-09-07 prerelease

Post by **Alex K.** » Thu Sep 09, 2010 2:46 am

Hello,

We are working on the problem, but we cannot say when it will be available.
Please send us a sample project with database which reproduces the problem.

Thank you.

patearl · Post by **patearl** » Thu Sep 09, 2010 11:30 am

I'm not sure what the problem is, but it looks to be loading icons for the dictionary tree view. Is it possible to have an option to just turn off the icons entirely? Given that we're under significant time pressure, it would be great to have something that works now and something that's perfect later. Reading the words is easy enough.

We will work to produce a test case that doesn't involve our entire software package. I imagine it will just end up being a bunch of classes with many properties. That would correspond with our data model and with the fact that it's building the data dictionary tree.

patearl · Post by **patearl** » Thu Sep 09, 2010 3:43 pm

The included test case is representative of the business class hierarchy we're using. Granted it's a bit contrived in itself, but it demonstrates the problem well.

Post by **Alex K.** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 1:15 am

Hello,

Thank you for the sample you sent.
We have solution for the issue. But it is a very hard in realization. And due to preparing to the official release we cannot do it fast. We have added the problem to our to-do list.

Thank you.