c# - ProgressBar is slow in Windows Forms

Question

I'm using Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2010. Create a .Net 4 Windows Forms Application. Drop a progress bar on the default form, add code to handle the form load event and do a progressBar1.Value = 100; there.

Start debugging and you see an animation moving the progress bar to 100 in about half a second.

I need 2 progress bars in my project. One is for "global progress" and the second is for "current step progress" so the second goes from 0 to 100 and hen back to 0 for the next step. The problem is that with the progress bar being slow for some of the quick steps it never reaches 100 and it looks weird.

Is there a way to get rid of that animation? In WPF it's OK but I'd rather stay with Windows Forms.

Answer 1

This is just how the Vista/7 progress bar is designed. When you change the value of the progress bar, the bar is animated to that value progressively.

The only way I know of avoiding this problem is to go backwards when updating the progress bar, as follows:

progressBar1.Value = n;
if (n>0)
    progressBar1.Value = n-1;

For a more complete discussion see Disabling .NET progressbar animation when changing value?