Winforms Progress bar Does Not Update (C#)

It sounds like you are blocking the UI thread – i.e. you haven’t released the system to do any painting.

A hacky answer is to inject Application.DoEvents() into your code – but this is risky, and has problems with re-entrancy etc; and it is just a bit hacky.

A better option may be to do the processing on a BackgroundWorker, periodically switching to the UI thread to update things (Control.Invoke) – but this may be tricky if you are adding lots of items to a ListView.

Full example (although you might want to batch the UI updates – not a row at a time):

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Threading;
using System.Windows.Forms;

class MyForm : Form
{
    BackgroundWorker worker;
    ListView list;
    Button btn;
    ProgressBar bar;
    public MyForm()
    {
        Text = "Loader";
        worker = new BackgroundWorker();
        worker.WorkerReportsProgress = true;
        worker.ProgressChanged += worker_ProgressChanged;
        worker.DoWork += worker_DoWork;
        worker.RunWorkerCompleted += worker_RunWorkerCompleted;
        list = new ListView();
        list.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
        Controls.Add(list);
        btn = new Button();
        btn.Text = "Load";
        btn.Dock = DockStyle.Bottom;
        Controls.Add(btn);
        btn.Click += btn_Click;
        bar = new ProgressBar();
        bar.Dock = DockStyle.Top;
        Controls.Add(bar);
    }

    void worker_RunWorkerCompleted(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
        btn.Enabled = true;
    }

    void btn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        worker.RunWorkerAsync();
        btn.Enabled = false;
    }


    void worker_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
        {
            string newRow = "Row " + i.ToString();
            worker.ReportProgress(i, newRow);
            Thread.Sleep(100);
        }
    }

    void worker_ProgressChanged(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        list.Items.Add((string)e.UserState);
        bar.Value = e.ProgressPercentage;
    }

    [STAThread]
    static void Main()
    {
        Application.EnableVisualStyles();
        Application.Run(new MyForm());
    }
}