I have my main form in my application and it may contain up to 4 listviews. When I say may, I am using the devexpress layout control and the user may customize the form and remove any/all of the listviews if they are not relevant for their usage.

Now one of the listviews takes the most time to populate. At around 19 seconds for the whole form to load, I can't say I am happy with it. I have done a heap of stuff refining what is returned from the DB and also used Beginupdate and Endupdate and this has made some difference I have gained about 8 seconds off the original start-up time.

My rowpopulating event has some relatively simple coding in there to test values and display in a different colour where necessary.

Now, I am loading around 8000 items, which yes, is a lot (but some msdn guys are loading tens of 000's) and they may not be used, so I would like to look at the possibility of using VirtualMode or maybe do you have a paging method for the listview?

Ideally, I would like to be able to load the listview off a background thread, but I think I know where that would lead.

Ideas appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Geoff Hirst