Does disabling temporaraly unused controls improve application performance?

Question

hi all I have many controls in a windows form app. currently I am using Hide() when controls are not to be used. Some of these controls implement Event Handlers. If I were to Disable the control as well as hide would this improve the application performance eg. enabling the controls only presently needed? would the EventHandlers for disabled controls be frozen or stopped? Thanks in advance for your response Jeremy

Brandon Lewis · Answer

Even if you disable the controls I dont think there will be much of a performance improvement if any at all seeing as how the controls are still there. By disabling/enabling the controls your actually causing a performance degredation because the application needs to process those commands and redraw the controls and reset their accessibility. But unless you managing 50 controls this wont grant you much of a performance improvement. If you need to you can always simply change the Visible property of the control to false which has less overhead than disabling the control and will keep the user from activating it. As for the event handlers they will never be triggered by a user unless some other control attempts to activate the hidden or disabled control and indirectly triggers the event handler. Event handlers are tied to the control specified whether or not its enabled or disabled.