Suppose I have a tab-based interface like Internet Explorer. In each tabpage cpu-intensive stuff can happen (f.e. displaying a waveform and calculating and displaying a realtime FFT) that is only relevant as realtime statistic - so only when it's actuallty visible to the user.
What's the best way to approach this ?
You can subscribe to the PropertyChanged event of the TabControl (with SelectedIndex property) to detect which tab is displayed.
I'm not sure there is a similar control in WPF but I think the thought is the same.
In Silverlight there is a Navigation Pane control which shows only the page which is selected from the tabcontrol. This way only relevant data is shown.