Dear friends,
thanx for your tips. first I want to tell, Anthony that my UI-design is great
As I told, I have to code an explorer-lookalike. can you explain me how to categorize 20.000 files in a directory ??? does win-explorer this ??? NO, for this reason i MUST do it...
Ok, but I found some smart solutions, and, dear Anthony I archived a speed as in win-explorer on a 233Mhz PII. What impossible ??
1. Set the number of listentries to the value of expected entries. For example, if I read a directory that has 20.000 entries, I set the Count / Capacity-Values to 20.000 before adding entries.
2. Call BeginUpdate before adding and EndUpdate after adding on the List (this speeded things up very much).
3 Put the adding-task in a single thread. This speeded up adding on factor 5 !!!

Ok, I did some things on the way adding the entries too by using meaningful memory alignment etc. but those actions did speed up the task just a little bit. Now on a 1,24 Ghz machine you cannot see anything of the adding of 20.000 entries, ok my slow harddisk makes it a little bit slow... remember win-explorer not some weird listview to watch db-entries. In this case, dear Anthony, I would have surely selected another design than just reading all entries into the listview. but sometimes you must even do this: Imagine you have to develop a db-application for a db with thousands of entries in a single table. don't tell me that this is bad db-design, because if my customer wants to have an application for his existing db you cannot go to your customer and tell him "hey your db-design is sh.., go ahead and change it, or I cannot build you app".

Greets

Juergen