How to create a fast loading wrapping ListBox?

Question

I've made a nice little three-item wide list of tiles that work as switches. It looks something like this:

Looking good huh? Well, I have about 130 of these tiles in a vertically scrolling list, and it takes ages to load. According to the performance analysis tool, each element takes about 18ms to render - which gives me about a 2.3 second rendering time. On the device, it's often twice that time. This wouldn't really be a crisis, but the UI is totally black and unresponsive up until these elements have been drawn.

After some research online, I realized this is because the WrapPanel control from the toolkit doesn't virtualize its items - thus making the GPU render all objects at once (using up a lot of memory in the process).

Now, are there any ways to make this go faster?

XAML:

<ListBox x:Name="ChannelsListBox" Grid.Row="2" Margin="0,40,0,0">
    <ListBox.ItemsPanel>
        <ItemsPanelTemplate>
            <toolkit:WrapPanel />
        </ItemsPanelTemplate>
    </ListBox.ItemsPanel>
    <ListBox.Template>
        <ControlTemplate>
            <ItemsPresenter />
        </ControlTemplate>
    </ListBox.Template>
    <ListBox.ItemTemplate>
        <DataTemplate>
            <Grid x:Name="ChannelTile" Margin="6,6,6,6" Tap="ChannelTile_Tap">
                <!-- context menu code removed -->
                <Rectangle Width="136" Height="136" Fill="{StaticResource LightGrayColor}" />    
            </Grid>
        </DataTemplate>
    </ListBox.ItemTemplate>
</ListBox>

The ListBox's ItemsSource is set in the codebehind - if you wondered.

Answer 1

Well, if you populate the listbox asynchronously from another thread, you can avoid the unresponsive UI.

EDITED2:

public partial class MainPage : UserControl
{
    public MainPage()
    {
        InitializeComponent();

        /* In the xaml code:
           <ListBox x:Name="ChannelsListBox" ItemsSource="{Binding ListOfTestClasses}" ...
        */

        var vm = new MainPageViewModel();
        DataContext = vm;

        vm.StartLoadingDataAsync(10000);
    }
}

public class MainPageViewModel
{
    public ObservableCollection<TestClass> ListOfTestClasses { get; set; }
    private BackgroundWorker workerThread;
    public MainPageViewModel()
    {
        ListOfTestClasses = new ObservableCollection<TestClass>();
        workerThread = new BackgroundWorker();
        workerThread.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler((object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) =>
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < (int)e.Argument; i++)
            {
                Deployment.Current.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
                {
                    ListOfTestClasses.Add(new TestClass { Text = "Element " + (i + 1) });
                });

                Thread.Sleep(150);
            }
        });
    }

    public void StartLoadingDataAsync(int numberOfElements)
    {
        workerThread.RunWorkerAsync(numberOfElements);   
    }
}

public class TestClass
{
    public string Text { get; set; }
}