How to animate a winforms custom control in C# without flickering?

Question

I am looking for some help on how to animate a winforms custom control, the animations are simple fade-in fadeout or something a like an accordion style animation.

Can you please suggest any articles or code related to this.

Answer 1

It's called the DoubleBuffer property ( MS documentation ).

Here's an example .

Answer 2

Yep, use DoubleBuffer. A couple of tips I remember picking up:

• Don't do anything other than copy a back buffer to the control in the control's paint method.

• Handle refresh of the control in an independent thread.

• Don't call refresh from any event handlers that modify the control! :)