Resource management when changing window content

First of all, I do not feel completely educated on how to navigate between multiple "pages" of a window.

For example, I have a Window called MainWindow. Inside of this, I have a header and a footer. In the middle is a panel which contains content. This panel will originally contain content A. Upon clicking something in A, I want to remove A from view and show a new panel with content B. However, I want B to be shown in the same window (i.e., not hide the window and open a new one). Is hiding/showing these panels the correct way to go about it?

If using the panel switching mechanism is the correct way, then I am worried about resource management. If I set panel A to not be visible, and panel B to be visible, will I still have resources from both panels loaded? If I have a large number of panels to switch between, I would not want to load content开发者_开发技巧 for all of them, but rather the active one. How would I go about making sure that I am correctly handling resources and memory between these different views?

If I have the completely wrong idea about how to switch views within a single window, please let me know. Thanks.

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Instead of toggling visibility off and on, you should put a contentControl and switch it's contents to different UserControls.

That way there's no reference to the UserControl that's offscreen, and you can handle memory issues better.

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One alternative is to just use a single ContentPresenter, and put your individual "panels" in there, but only one at a time.

Instead of flipping visibility, you could use Data Binding to change the bound content within the ContentPresenter. This would only leave a single "view" in place at a time, preventing the neeed for "a large number" of panels to be loaded.