I have a form with about 30 panels on it, one stacked on top of another.  When it is chosen from the selection list, the panel is then made visible and brought to the front.  My problem here is that my form is taking something like 10 seconds to load because it appears that it is trying to draw all of the panels and their controls even though they should not be visible.  Is there something that can be done about this or something I may not be doing correctly?  I would think that drawing time should only be affected by what you can see on the form.  It sohuld not be trying to render panels that are hidden behind other panels.  Please let me know what can be done here.  Thanks.

Well, this is a lot of panels, but not necessisarily the problem.  It would depend on how many controls are on the panels, etc.  Also, what else is going on....are you loading up data, doing other types of calucaltions, etc.  Here is the problem....even though the controls may not be rendering, they are still being instantiated.  Also, DevExpress is slower than using standard controls or even Infragistics....this is why we moved away from them is because of this very reason...they have rebasing issues and all of their themes use images rather than render.  So you will have to be a little more creative.  One thing you can do is class the pages and them bring them into the PanelManager as needed rather than having them all there at once.  Even if you were using standard controls...though it would be faster, it would still be slow if too much is happening on one form.  So look at your form and see if there is a way for you to split things up.  You can also get something like the Ants Profiler and run it against your application and it will tell you how long every line of code is taking and give you exact indicators of where your problem spots are.