ListView – is it really too slow?

I have seen a number of blog entries along the lines of ‘ListView is too slow’, or ‘WPF is too slow’, or the worst one of all ‘ListView has performance issues’.
Obviously none of them mention any details, nor elaborate on what issues there might be – sounds a bit like an old project manager of mine :-)

So, what is the reality? That is difficult to know, as there a number of things that can adversely affect the performance of a ListView – but are by no means certain to do so!

Some of the things that may affect performance are:

• Embedding the ListView inside a StackPanel
• Embedding the ListView inside a ScrollViewer
• Not setting ScrollViewer.CanContentScroll to true
• Having too many columns
• Having UI Virtualization turned off (VirtualizingStackPanel.IsVirtualizing)

 There may be some more!

To answer the question, is it too slow? As long as you follow the above, then no