You are encountering the differences between physical scrolling and
logical scrolling.
As you have discovered, each has its tradeoffs.
Physical scrolling
Physical scrolling (CanContentScroll=false) just goes by pixels, so:
The viewport always represents exactly the same portion of your scroll
extent, giving you a smooth scrolling experience, and but
The entire contents of the DataGrid must have all templates fully
applied and be measured and arranged to determine the size of the
scrollbar, leading to long delays during loading and high RAM usage,
and It doesn't really scroll items so it doesn't understand
ScrollIntoView very well Logical scrolling
Logical scrolling (CanContentScroll=true) calculates its scroll viewport and extent by items instead of pixels, so:
The viewport may show a different number of items at different times,
meaning the number of items in the viewport as compared to the number
of items in the extent varies, causing the scrollbar length to change,
and
Scrolling moves from one item to the next and never in between,
leading to "jerky" scrolling
but
As long as you're using VirtualizingStackPanel under the hood, it only
needs to apply templates and measure and arrange the items that are
actually visible at the moment, and
ScrollIntoView is much simpler since it just needs to get the right
item index into view
Choosing between them
These are the only two kinds of scrolling provided by WPF. You must
choose between them based on the above tradeoffs. Generally logical
scrolling is best for medium to large datasets, and physical scrolling
is best for small ones.
A trick to speed loading during physical scrolling is to make the
physical scrolling better is to wrap your items in a custom Decorator
that has a fixed size and sets its child's Visibility to Hidden when
it is not visible. This prevents the ApplyTemplate, Measure and
Arrange from occuring on the descendant controls of that item until
you're ready for it to happen.
A trick to make physical scrolling's ScrollIntoView more reliable is
to call it twice: Once immediately and once in a dispatcher callback
of DispatcherPriority.ApplicationIdle.
Making logical scroll scrollbar more stable
If all your items are the same height, the number of items visible in
the viewport at any time will stay the same, causing the scroll thumb
size to stay the same (because the ratio with total number if items
doesn't change).
It is also possible to modify the behavior of the ScrollBar itself so
the thumb is always calculated to be a fixed size. To do this without
any hacky code-behind:
Subclass Track to replace the calculation of Thumb position and size in MeasureOverride with your own
Change the ScrollBar template used for the logical-scrolling ScrollBar to use your subclassed Track instead of the regular
one
Change the ScrollViewer template to explicitly set your custom ScrollBar template on the logical-scrolling ScrollBar
(instead of using the default template)
Change the ListBox template to use explicitly set your custom ScrollViewer template on the ScrollViewer it creates
This means copying a lot of template code fom the built-in WPF
templates, so it is not a very elegant solution. But the alternative
to this is to use hacky code-behind to wait until all the templates
are expanded, then find the ScrollBar and just replace the ScrollBar
template with the one that uses your custom Track. This code saves two
large templates (ListBox, ScrollViewer) at the cost of some very
tricky code.
Using a different Panel would be a much larger amount of work:
VirtualizingStackPanel is the only Panel that virtualizes, and only it
and StackPanel to logical scrolling. Since you are taking advantage of
VirtualizingStackPanel's virtualization abilities you would have to
re-implement all of these plus all IScrollInfo info function plus your
regular Panel functions. I could do something like that but I would
allocate several, perhaps many, days to get it right. I recommend you
not try it.
