Animated Gifs in .NET

I hadn't noticed that the graphic classes in .NET had built-in support for animated gifs, but a recent GDN post shows how you can grab the individual frames out of a GIF and display them one at a time... I think you would have to find out the intended delay between frames to produce the author's desired result, but I'm not positive as it has been awhile since I made an animated gif :)

<www.gotdotnet.com/Community/MessageBoard/Thread.aspx?id=180291>

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2004
  Windows Forms has built-in support for GIF animation via the ImageAnimator class, e.g.
  
  // Load animated GIF
  Bitmap gif = new Bitmap(@"C:SAMPLE_ANIMATION_COPY.GIF");
  
  void AnimationForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
  // Check if image supports animation
  if( ImageAnimator.CanAnimate(gif) ) {
  // Subscribe to event indicating the next frame should be shown
  ImageAnimator.Animate(gif, new EventHandler(gif_FrameChanged));
  }
  }
  
  void gif_FrameChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) {
  if( this.InvokeRequired ) {
  // Transition from worker thread to UI thread
  this.BeginInvoke(
  new EventHandler(gif_FrameChanged),
  new object[] { sender, e });
  }
  else {
  // Trigger Paint event to draw next frame
  this.Invalidate();
  }
  }
  
  void AnimationForm_Paint(object sender, PaintEventArgs e) {
  // Update image's active frame
  ImageAnimator.UpdateFrames(gif);
  
  // Draw image's current frame
  Graphics g = e.Graphics;
  g.DrawImage(gif, this.ClientRectangle);
  }
  
  This is covered in Chapter 4 of Windows Forms Programming: http://sellsbrothers.com/writing/wfbook
• Anonymous
  January 12, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  January 23, 2004
  Duh!
  Just Place the Animated Gif in a picturebox on the form and let it handle all the animation - automatically!
• Anonymous
  February 25, 2004
  Rama,
  
  The request was to play the animation exactly one time then stop.
  
  Placed in a PictureBox this control is not possible.
  
  Mike