Question

I have this algorithm that are drawing a lot of pixels on a Canvas in an animation. But I have no control of the speed of the animation and it is drawing very fast, so I added a Thread.Sleep(1) but then it is too slow when drawing several thousand pixels.
I have tried a Storyboard approach but that ended up to be a very slow.

So are there an alternative to the Thread.sleep for slowing down my loop?

void DrawGasket(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
    {
        Random rnd = new Random();
        Color color = Colors.White;
        while (Counter <= noOfPx)
        {
            switch (rnd.Next(3))
            {
                case 0:
                    m_lastPoint.X = (m_top.X + m_lastPoint.X)/2;
                    m_lastPoint.Y = (m_top.Y + m_lastPoint.Y)/2;
                    color = Colors.White;
                    break;
                case 1:
                    m_lastPoint.X = (m_left.X + m_lastPoint.X)/2;
                    m_lastPoint.Y = (m_left.Y + m_lastPoint.Y)/2;
                    color = Colors.Orange;
                    break;
                case 2:
                    m_lastPoint.X = (m_right.X + m_lastPoint.X)/2;
                    m_lastPoint.Y = (m_right.Y + m_lastPoint.Y)/2;
                    color = Colors.Purple;
                    break;
            }
            Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
            {
                var px = new Rectangle { 
                                       Height = m_pxSize, 
                                       Width = m_pxSize,
                                       Fill = new SolidColorBrush(color) 
                                       };
                Canvas.SetTop(px, m_lastPoint.Y);
                Canvas.SetLeft(px, m_lastPoint.X);
                can.Children.Add(px);
                lblCounter.Text = Counter.ToString();
            });
            Counter++;
            Thread.Sleep(1);
        }
    }

Answer 1

Can’t you just sleep every N iterations through the loop rather than every iteration?