Quick tip [link]: the PerformanceProgressBar (Windows Phone 7)

The ProgressBar control available in Windows Phone 7 has a poor performance when in ‘indeterminate’ state. Jeff Wilcox, a developer on the Silverlight team has created a new template you can apply to the built-in control: the PerformanceProgressBar. This new template does not change the control’s usage but makes it much more performing by offloading from the UI thread and making use of the Compositor thread for all animations.

Implementing the new template is really easy, just add the provided new class, add the new template to App.xaml and apply the style when using ProgressBar. All details can be found in Jeff’s post “The high performance ProgressBar for Windows Phone (“PerformanceProgressBar”)”, and follow-up post “Windows Phone performance progress bar update: part 2, remember to turn IsIndeterminate off when not needed!”.

 

‘ Quick tip ’ posts are short, useful posts pointing to content and tricks that might otherwise go lost in a typical 140 chars on Twitterverse.