drawchange | An application to manage volunteer registrations | Portal library

I am having a bit of a small issue performing a certain task in my winforms application.

I am basically attempting to recreate a "Top-View RTS Map", on a winform. In order to save memory, not all tiles of the "Map" are displayed on the screen. Only the ones that fit within the viewport. Therefore, I am trying to allow the user to perform a pan/scroll on the displayed tiles in order to navigate the entire map!

Right now, I am doing this by creating and displaying GroupBox controls dynamically at runtime. These represent the tiles...

I have created my own objects to support all of this (contains screen coordinates, Row and Col info, etc.)

Here is how I am currently accomplishing all of this, in pseudo-code:

Creating the form, tiles and the map in general

1. I create a winforms form that is 600px X 600px.

2. I create a new "Map" (using a List) that is 100 tiles by 100 tiles (for testing) on form load and save that into a variable.

3. I keep track of the displayed tiles via another list (or property that derives from the main list bool MapTile.isDrawn)

4. Each tile is visually made of a GroupBox control that is 100px X 100px (so [7 X 7] of them fit on screen)

5. To start, I find the center MapTile (tile [50, 50]) in the "Map", create the GroupBox for it and place that in the middle of the form,

6. I then add the other tiles/controls necessary to fill in the form (center - 3 tiles, center + 3 tiles (up, down, left, and right)).

7. Each tile, of course, subscribes to the proper mouse events to perform a drag

8. When the user mouse drags a tile, all other tiles being displayed follow suit/follow the leader by updating all "displayed tiles" coordinates to match the movement that was made by the "dragged" tile.

Managing Displayed Tiles

1. While the GroupBox tiles are being dragged/moved, I perform a check to see if the tiles that are on the outer edge of the viewport are within its bounds.
2. If, as an example, the top-left-most tile's right edge falls outside the bounds of the left edge of the viewport, I remove the entire left column tiles, and add the entire right column tiles programmatically. The same goes all directions (up, down, left and right).

So far, this works fine as long as I don't go too fast... however, when I drag the tiles "too fast" passed an outer edge (e.g.: where point 2 ci-dessus would apply), it seems that the application is unable to keep up because it doesn't add the column or row where they should be on the form, and other times, it does not have time to remove all controls of a row or column and I end up with controls that are still on the screen when they shouldn't be there. At that point the entire grid/map is off balance and stops working as intended because either the events that should fire on one edge don't (the tiles are not present) and/or there are now multiple controls with the same name on the form and the removal or referencing fails...

While I am well aware that winforms is not designed to perform intensive GPU/GDI operations, you would think that something this simple would still be easily do-able in winforms?

How would I go about making this more responsive at runtime? Here's my entire set of code:

Form code