CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#wpf
Danger Zone
Danger Zone

Reputation: 159

How to Draw 100's to 1000's of basic shapes without freezing the display in c#

I have tried using a simple for loop:

using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Shapes;

namespace WPFGamesChess
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Interaction logic for MainWindow.xaml
    /// </summary>
    public partial class MainWindow
    {
        public MainWindow()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            Dispatcher.Invoke(makeGrid);
        }

        public void makeGrid()
        {
            Size s = new Size(20, 20);
            for (int y = 0; y < s.Height; y++)
            {
                for (int x = 0; x < s.Width; x++)
                {
                    Rectangle r = new Rectangle();
                    if ((x+y) % 2 == 0)
                    {
                        r.Fill = Brushes.Black;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        r.Fill = Brushes.White;
                    }
                    r.Stroke = Brushes.Black;
                    r.StrokeThickness = 0;

                    double h = (RootGrid.Height / s.Height);
                    double w = (RootGrid.Width / s.Width); 

                    r.Height = h;
                    r.Width = w;

                    r.Margin = new Thickness(0, 0, RootGrid.Width - r.Width - (x*w*2), RootGrid.Height - r.Height - (y*h*2));
                    RootGrid.Children.Add(r);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

However, doing it this way prevents the display from loading as far as I can tell. I figured that this would need to be multi-threaded, but I can't figure out how to do that either. What I'm trying to do is make a grid for a chess board, but I'd like to be able to re-use that code for making a larger grid for a strategy game.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 426

Answers (1)

Mark Feldman
Mark Feldman

Reputation: 16119

If you only need a few thousand objects...and most of them won't animate...then regular data-binding should handle that fine without tying up the GUI thread. Here's an example from an application I wrote in which each grid cell contains 17 different elements, that's almost 15,000 in total:

enter image description here

This is implemented with an ItemsControl using a Canvas as the panel and DataTemplating to select the types of elements to create. I don't notice any discernible pause at start-up, and real-time editing etc is perfectly smooth.

Also, since you specifically mentioned chess, here's an example of that I created earlier using the same technique, with the following result:

enter image description here

Upvotes: 2

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