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BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel^© .NET - A "UI Virtualizing" WrapPanel control for the Silverlight 3 .NET framework.

BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel .NET is a UI Virtualization capable WrapPanel control for the Silverlight .NET applications.
The control is extremely helpful in boosting the performance of UI, especially when you have the need to associate large amounts of data with an ItemsControl that has to display content in an automatic Wrapping fashion.

The control has been written from scratch, implementing custom layout and scrolling logic, and providing support for two display orientations, viz., - Vertical and Horizontal.

Version 1.0.0 is now available. The product is available as part of our UiControlSuite .NET package.
View Release notes.

Product available for purchase as part of our product UIControlSuite .NET package
For more details on pricing, please visit our product pricing page.

What do you get:

Comprehensive MSDN style documentation

No run-time royalties! All you need to buy - is just one license per developer!

Technical support and cost-free version upgrades for the initial twelve (12) months

System requirements:

Minimum requirements:- Microsoft .NET framework 3.5 with SP 1, and Silverlight 3 RTM.
For visual development, the product requires you have Visual Studio 2008 installed.
Supported platforms:- Windows XP Professional, Windows 2003 / 2008, Windows Vista
Development environments supported:- Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 and Microsoft Expression Blend 3 RC and above).

Feature highlights:

"UI Virtualizing" WrapPanel for Silverlight 3:

BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel .NET is a UI Virtualization capable WrapPanel control for the Silverlight 3 .NET applications.
Similar to the WPF .NET Framework's WrapPanel, BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel arranges the content/child elements in a sequential fashion, and automatically flowing the content into the next line at the edge of the viewport.

In additon, the BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel control automatically virtualizes and realizes, and arranges the associated content, by automatically creating and destroying the containers for the content items.

Instead of letting the layout system generate all the UI elements that are associated with the control (i.e. all items from the content), the control automatically works out the number of elements that will be displayed in the viewport, and creates the UI element containers for only those elements that will be visible at any given time in the control.

When disposing off the virtualized items/item containers, the control performs the clean up in a separate dispatcher operation, so as to ensure that the virtualisation process eliminates any negative performance impact.

BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel .NET is the world's first commercial Virtualizing wrappanel control for the Silverlight 3 .NET framework.

Online demonstration:

View an online demonstration of this control in action, with support for variying sizes for Width and Height values for the virtualised items.

Custom layout management:

The control is written from scratch, and implements custom logic for content layout and scrolling. The control supports two layout orientations viz., Horizontal and Vertical Orientations, and fully custom implements IScrollInfo interface for scrolling support.

"On demand" realizing of a desired child item:

The control is capable of realizing a specified item from the associated data-bound source and scroll it into view, given the item's index.

Configurable "virtualization" scheme:

The control allows you to choose from two virtualisation schemes - viz.,

Dispose off (virtualize) the children the moment they leave the bounds of the viewport,

Let the control perform a light-weight cache of the virtualized items.

This feature will let you have fine-grain control over the virtualizing mechanism to be used, purely based on the amount of memory to be used in not disposing off the virtualised items vs. the disk reads required to realize/(re)construct the item containers for the UI elements again (when needed again).

You can decide on this based on the ItemTemplate/datatemplate of your items that are to be displayed in the control.

Animation of wrapping action:

The control can (optionally) perform an "animation" while wrapping the child elements from one row/line to the next.

No procedural code needed to setup the control:

In contrast to the very powerful features in the control, you will find it extremely easy to setup and run the control in your applications with absolutely no procedural code.
Either using Designer tools like MS Expression Blend or the likes, or even with hand-cranked one line of XAML, you will be able to run the control in just few seconds.

All that it takes to use this control, is to set the ItemsPanelTemplate of your ItemsControl with an instance of BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel control.

You can see a screenshot below that displays a code snippet where the control has been setup in just one line of XAML, which instantiates the BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel control, and sets it as the ItemsPanelTemplate, having configured some of its rich UI properties as well.