Better ListView 2.10 released

Libor Tinka — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:57:54 +0000

A new version with major improvements, optimizations and fixes has been released! It addresses many suggestions provided by you, our valued customers.

Improved Performance

We put a considerable effort into optimizing Better ListView 2 to provide advanced features (e.g. hierarchical and multi-line items, collapsible groups) while still being swift and responsive.

The overall performance has greatly improved. Better ListView 2.1 can easily handle 10.000 items while still being very fast. The parts where improvements are best seen are:

Adding many items to the list
Expanding/collapsing of hierarchical items
Resizing a column

We also added new options in the Performance property group, so you can easily switch between fast and powerful options.

Samples in both C# and Visual Basic

We added easy to understand samples for both C# and Visual Basic.

You can simply follow a link from start menu to open the Visual Studio project for your favourite language, and play with all the features of Better ListView.

C# and VB Samples projects in Solution Explorer

Extended Documentation

We added a Quick Start Tutorial to help you with setup, activation and integration of Better ListView in your projects, as well as many entirely new chapters in the documentation.

All code samples are from now on provided in both C# and Visual Basic to be easy to understand to both C# and VB.net developers.

Smoother migration from .NET ListView to Better ListView

Better ListView now contains all the constructor/method overloads and properties of the regular .NET ListView, so that for each member of .NET ListView there is an easily discoverable equivalent in Better ListView.

Coming soon: Better ListView 2.1 Optimized for Performance

Libor Tinka — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:33:45 +0000

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.