Reduce flickering on custom invalidate/paint

Say we are doing custom painting on a panel, and we want to reduce flickering as much as possible. There's a few ways to do it, but this is the greatest...

Let's say your panel is called this.splitContainerMain.Panel2, then do this in your form constructor...

typeof(Panel).InvokeMember("DoubleBuffered",
BindingFlags.SetProperty | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic,
null, this.splitContainerMain.Panel2, new object[] { true });

Background info on how this sort of thing is done...

In a method, such as RefreshPanel() (which is also called very early in form's life)

var bitMap = new Bitmap(splitContainerMain.Panel2.Width, splitContainerMain.Panel2.Height);

using (var g = Graphics.FromImage(bitMap)) {
	//Do your custom drawing... something more inspired than this hopefully
	g.DrawRectangle(System.Drawing.Pens.Black, 10, 10, 10, 10);
}

//This causes the repaint!
this.splitContainerMain.Panel2.Invalidate();

And then, in the paint method, just render the bitmap.

private void splitContainer1_Panel2_Paint(object sender, PaintEventArgs e)
{
	if (bitMap == null) return;
	e.Graphics.DrawImage(bitMap, new Point(0, 0));
}

Reference

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8046560/how-to-stop-flickering-c-sharp-winforms