Better ListView 2 comes with many hot features, like groups and item hierarchy. Great features, unfortunately, often come at the price of decreased performance. However, we want to have Better ListView both feature-rich and fast.
Some users noticed a performance drop when working with large number of items (say 10 000+). Our top priority for version 2.1 is the overall optimization of Better ListView. Several optimizations have already been made in the recent updates (column resizing and thumbnail images), but we have to go further. You can expect Better ListView to be much snappier in the upcoming 2.1 update. The optimizations will cover these areas:
- Faster collection operations (adding, removing, sorting) of large number of items
- Faster expand/collapse of groups and items
- Faster column resizing with multi-line items
We will also take a look on smoother Visual Studio integration, so you can see Better ListView ready in toolbox just after installation (we have to deal with Visual Studio Packages, which is quite an esoteric topic). If Better ListView doesn’t currently appear in your Visual Studio toolbox automatically, you can just right-click the toolbox window, and use “Choose Items” to add the DLL file yourself.
Some background info for the more curious of you: Version 1.5 of Better ListView was very fast. It was so fast because every item in the list had precisely the same size. Some operations, like hit testing, was done in constant time and no extra measurement of individual items was necessary. The new major 2.0 version of Better ListView supports items with variable sizes, and irregular layout consisting of grouped items. However, we observed that even in complex settings, there are just few “types” of items – for example, there are only three possible item sizes when using multi-line items with up to three lines of text. Our optimizations will thus be focused on taking advantage of this to reduce most expensive operations back to constant time complexity.
photo by Michael Roper