Bea Stollnitz » Data virtualization

Data virtualization
My last post covered the current UI virtualization support on Silverlight and WPF. In this post, I will discuss another technique that helps improve performance when dealing with large data sets: data virtualization.
A control that uses data virtualization knows to keep in memory no more data items than the ones needed for display. For example, if a data-virtualized ListBox is data bound to 1,000,000 data items and only displays 100 at a single point in time, it only keeps about 100 data items in memory. If the user scrolls, the data-virtualized ListBox knows to swap the items in memory in a way that optimizes performance and memory consumption.
I talked about a possible solution that provides partial data virtualization for TreeView in a previous post. I discussed that solution in the context of WPF, but it could just as easily be used for Silverlight. The discussion in this post addresses data virtualization for non-hierarchical scenarios.