One of the cool things coming in the 2.5 release of Xamarin Forms is something called Layout Compression. If you have done any kind of Xaml work whether with Xamarin Forms or WPF or even Silverlight, you know that end up with multiple levels of nested containers before finally reaching content.

All of these elements have to be recursed through to determine the measurements and the layouts and this can take time, especially when you start to consider wrappers for platform renderers, list/tree view item templates to name a few.

In 2.5, you can tell Xamarin Forms which views can be opted out of rendering to speed up your UI, simply by adding the ‘CompressedLayout.IsHeadless=”True”‘ to your Layout.

<StackLayout CompressedLayout.IsHeadless="true" >

</StackLayout>

It’s important to remember that anything you expected to be part of the layout will be gone, things such as the background color, gestures etc. So be careful what you compress!

I am looking forward to trying out 2.5 (still in pre-release in nuget) on one of my projects.