Double buffering with C# has negative effect
- by Roland Illig
I have written the following simple program, which draws lines on the screen every 100 milliseconds (triggered by timer1). I noticed that the drawing flickers a bit (that is, the window is not always completely blue, but some gray shines through). So my idea was to use double-buffering. But when I did that, it made things even worse. Now the screen was almost always gray, and only occasionally did the blue color come through (demonstrated by timer2, switching the DoubleBuffered property every 2000 milliseconds).
What could be an explanation for this?
using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace WindowsFormsApplication1 {
public partial class Form1 : Form {
public Form1() {
InitializeComponent();
}
private void Form1_Paint(object sender, PaintEventArgs e) {
Graphics g = CreateGraphics();
Pen pen = new Pen(Color.Blue, 1.0f);
Random rnd = new Random();
for (int i = 0; i < Height; i++)
g.DrawLine(pen, 0, i, Width, i);
}
// every 100 ms
private void timer1_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e) {
Invalidate();
}
// every 2000 ms
private void timer2_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e) {
DoubleBuffered = !DoubleBuffered;
this.Text = DoubleBuffered ? "yes" : "no";
}
}
}