Flickering during updates to Controls in WinForms (e.g. DataGridView)

Question

In my application I have a DataGridView control that displays data for the selected object. When I select a different object (in a combobox above), I need to update the grid

Answer 1

Double buffering won't help here since that only double buffers paint operations, the flickering the OP is seeing is the result of multiple paint operations:

• Clear control contents -> repaint
• Clear columns -> repaint
• Populate new columns -> repaint
• Add rows -> repaint

so that's four repaints to update the control, hence the flicker. Unfortunately, not all the standard controls have the BeginUpdate/EndUpdate which would remove all the repaint calls until the EndUpdate is called. Here's what you can do:

1. Have a different control for each data set and Show/Hide the controls,
2. Remove the control from its parent, update and then add the control again,
3. Write your own control.

Options 1 and 2 would still flicker a bit.

On the .Net GUI program I'm working on, I created a set of custom controls that eliminated all flicker.