Intersoft Presenter’s VirtualScroll™
In my previous post about our upcoming presenter for Silverlight, I have briefly mentioned about the performance in the “Piece-of-mind with bare-metal performance” section. Related to this performance topic, Andry has recently posted a blog discussing VirtualScroll™ — our innovative technology behind Intersoft Presenter that is designed to let you display any number of items without performance hit.
Personally, VirtualScroll is one of my favorite features in Presenter despite of many stunning UI/X capabilities. In fact, it’s the most crucial architecture that makes Presenter™ different and unique in many ways, especially when it comes to scalability factor.
Did someone force you to use server-side paging to speed up your Silverlight data presentation? I guess that’s because their products will crash — or probably hang like for several minutes — if you attempted to display what they-so-called “too many items” into their Grid. We’ve seen many of competing products do not understand about Silverlight nor its key strength in the RIA space, because they created a Grid with traditional ASP.NET/DHTML-style concept. We see it completely different here, as Silverlight introduces more advanced capabilities such as offline-ready scenarios where an application doesn’t have to connect to a server in order to display data.
Imagine a new scenario in Silverlight where you would like to have the possibility to download some static data and keep it locally through memory cache or isolated storage. If your static data contains records up to 500 or even thousands, you would really have to make sure your data presentation tool can display them up in decent performance. This is where our Presenter™ and DataSource™ steps in, which makes it possible to achieve the above scenario, and even more advanced scenarios that we’ll cover in the upcoming posts.
VirtualScroll is definitely a very powerful technology, although we have to went down the deep path to resolve every challenge and many difficult scenarios, for example when it deals with grouping, dynamic templating and more. Speaking about grouping and the rest features, there are some good news that we’ll announce in the next CTP of Intersoft Presenter™ and DataSource™. So, stay tuned!
By the way, Andry also includes a video that shows the performance comparison of standard control and Intersoft Presenter, as well as downloadable sample so you can try it out yourself. So, make sure you check it out here.
All the best,
Jimmy.
