Question

I’m working on a high performance BlackJack program. The application is mostly for show but there are some times when I want to disable all interface updates for performance reasons. When I update the UI (automatically with 100% bindings) I can get ~600 Cards/Sec dealt, without the table and controls being updated I can get 22,000+ Cards/Sec dealt.

I’m toying with simple ways to disable UI updates. The only way I’ve found is to set my BlackJackTable UserControls’s DataContext to that of a blank table ViewModel and allow the real table ViewModel to do all the computations. This poses problems when setting the DataContexts back to the real table ViewModel if I want to watch whats going on again.

So, in summary… Is there a simple way to suspend all bindings on an object? Removing visibility and disabled (IsEnabled = false) doesn’t help performance. Any suggestions for doing this the right way?

You don’t NEED to read below, but if you’re curious (or have a solution), here’s what I’ve been doing:

private void FastModeChk_Checked(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {
        if (TableViewModel.GameStatisticsVM.CardsDealt > 0) {
        BlackJackTable.DataContext = BlankTVM;
        DealerControlsTabItem.DataContext = BlankTVM;
        PlayerControlsTabItem.DataContext = BlankTVM.CurrentPlayerHandVM;
        DebugLogTabItem.DataContext = BlankTVM.LoggingVM;
    }
}
private void FastModeChk_Unchecked(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {
    BlackJackTable.DataContext = TableViewModel;
    DealerControlsTabItem.DataContext = TableViewModel;
    PlayerControlsTabItem.DataContext = TableViewModel.CurrentPlayerHandVM;
    DebugLogTabItem.DataContext = TableViewModel.LoggingVM;
}

The PlayerControlsTabItem doesn’t keep pulling from CurrentPlayerHandVM. I’m calling OnPropertyChanged and everything works great if the box doesn’t get checked. This code doesn’t work for some reason.

Answer 1

My thought is to put a short circuit in the RaisePropertyChanged() method call so that the PropertyChanged event is not called.

something like:

private int _myInt;
public int MyInt
{
    get { return _myInt; } 
    set
    {
        if(_myInt == value)
            return;

        _myInt = value;
        RaisePropertyChanged("MyInt");
    }
}

private void RaisePropertyChanged(string propertyName)
{
    //if the fastmode is checked, do not allow the PropertyChanged event to be fired.
    if(FastModeChk.Checked)
        return;

    var handler = PropertyChanged;
    if(handler != null)
        handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName);
}