In the past two years, Xceed has worked on the performance of Xceed DataGrid for WPF, and with August's release of v3.0, we feel we've achieved a great level of performance. The best in the industry if you not only count scrolling speed, but loading, sorting and grouping time as well.
Despite the new performance increases, there are still scenarios with slower systems on which the scrolling performance is not fast enough. The industry's solution to that (including Microsoft's own WPF datagrid) is to provide a "deferred scrolling mode". In deferred mode, a datagrid's display isn't updated while you are dragging the scrollbar, it updates only when you stop dragging. This scheme doesn't let you know where you will land when you let go of the thumb, so "scroll tips" were invented to display information about the first row of the page you would land on. Not a very good experience.
Earlier this year, we started working on Xceed DataGrid for WPF's "perceived performance". We added smooth scrolling to the datagrid, physics-like animation effects, and background generation and display of data items. The combination of these features provides a much better experience than with deferred scrolling, and boy does it look and feel delicious. When a user performs a "page down" action, the datagrid immediately responds by starting to smooth scroll to the next page, while fading-in the datarows as their containers and contents are generated. By the time the animation has slowed down, everything is properly displayed as expected. Instead of a delay on a slower computer when the user hits "page down", they get immediate feedback, giving the datagrid a snappy and fast feel to it. Here's a Channel 9 video (WMV High) on the new feature, and a couple more new related features such as group headers that always stay in view and touch gesture support.
Smooth Scrolling Datagrids with Xceed on Microsoft Channel9
I think it is clear that the industry looks toward Xceed as the trend-setter in WPF datagrid controls, and even WPF controls in general. We were the first to release one, the first to provide an XBAP demo (and a still unequaled one even after two years of availability), the first to announce the use in a major application such as Visual Studio Team System 2010, the first to bring 3D to datagrids, and now the first to demonstrate smooth scrolling, physics effects, touch gesture support, and background generation of UI elements to increase perceived performance.
