how to stop flickering C# winforms

For a "cleaner solution" and in order to keep using the base Panel, you could simply use Reflection to implement the double buffering, by adding this code to the form that holds the panels in which you want to draw in

    typeof(Panel).InvokeMember("DoubleBuffered", 
    BindingFlags.SetProperty | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic, 
    null, DrawingPanel, new object[] { true });

Where "DrawingPanel" is the name of the panel that you want to do the double buffering.

I know quite a lot of time has passed since the question was asked, but this might help somebody in the future.

Finally solved the flickering. Since I was drawing on a panel instead of the form the line of code below will not solve the flickering:

this.SetStyle(
    ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint | 
    ControlStyles.UserPaint | 
    ControlStyles.DoubleBuffer, 
    true);

SetStyle must be of type 'YourProject.YourProject' (or derived from it) hence, you have to create a class as such (so that you can use MyPanel which will be derived from SPaint.SPaint and hence allowing you to use doublebuffering directly for the panel - rather than the form):

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using SPaint; 

namespace YourProject
{
    public class MyPanel : System.Windows.Forms.Panel
    {
        public MyPanel()
        {
            this.SetStyle(
                System.Windows.Forms.ControlStyles.UserPaint | 
                System.Windows.Forms.ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint | 
                System.Windows.Forms.ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer, 
                true);
        }
    }
}

After you've done this(although you should really never edit the designer code unless you truly know what you're doing) you'll have to edit the Form.Designer.cs. Inside this file you will find code that looks like this:

this.panelArea = new YourProject.MyPanel();

The above line needs to be changed to:

this.panelArea = new MyPanel(); 

After I completed these steps, my paint program no longer flickers.

For anyone else having the same issue, the problem is finally solved.

Enjoy!

Copy and paste this into your project

protected override CreateParams CreateParams
{
    get
    {
        CreateParams handleParam = base.CreateParams;
        handleParam.ExStyle |= 0x02000000;   // WS_EX_COMPOSITED       
        return handleParam;
    }
}

This enables double-buffering for all controls from the form level down, otherwise double buffering needs to be individually enabled for each one... you may want to fine tune double bufferring after this because blanketed double buffering may give unwanted side effects.