Is there a performance disadvantage for WPF''s Control properties?

Question

I am learning WPF and it seems like some properties like Content are of type Object. When you have a very complex UI with 1000s of controls, would this be a problem with boxing, etc?

I see that this provides a lot of power (having Content to take anything), but just thought I should ask people's opinions about this.

Answer 1

There really shouldn't be any performance implications due to boxing, since typically, the Content used within a control is another Control, which is going to be a reference type anyways.

Making Content an object, however, allows you to use DataTemplates and provides a huge amount of the flexibility of WPF.

That being said, the overhead of boxing, even when you do use a value type as "Content", is going to be incredibly minimal when compared to the overhead involved in UI code in general.