How do you show animated GIFs on a Windows Form c

Question

I have a form showing progress messages as a fairly long process runs  It s a call to a web service so I can t really show a percentage complete figure on a progress bar meaningfully   I don t particularly like the Marquee property of the progress bar   I would like to show an animated GIF to give the process the feel of some activity  e g  files flying from one computer to another like Windows copy process    How do you do this

User · Answer

Public Class Form1      Private animatedimage As New Bitmap  C  MyData Search gif       Private currentlyanimating As Boolean   False      Private Sub OnFrameChanged ByVal sender As System Object  ByVal e As System EventArgs           Me Invalidate        End Sub      Private Sub AnimateImage            If currentlyanimating   True Then             ImageAnimator Animate animatedimage  AddressOf Me OnFrameChanged              currentlyanimating   False         End If      End Sub      Protected Overrides Sub OnPaint ByVal e As System Windows Forms PaintEventArgs           AnimateImage           ImageAnimator UpdateFrames animatedimage          e Graphics DrawImage animatedimage  New Point  Me Width   4    40   Me Height   4    40        End Sub      Private Sub Form1 Load ByVal sender As System Object  ByVal e As System EventArgs  Handles MyBase Load          BtnStop Enabled   False      End Sub      Private Sub BtnStop Click ByVal sender As System Object  ByVal e As System EventArgs  Handles BtnStop Click          currentlyanimating   False         ImageAnimator StopAnimate animatedimage  AddressOf Me OnFrameChanged          BtnStart Enabled   True         BtnStop Enabled   False      End Sub      Private Sub BtnStart Click ByVal sender As System Object  ByVal e As System EventArgs  Handles BtnStart Click          currentlyanimating   True         AnimateImage           BtnStart Enabled   False         BtnStop Enabled   True      End Sub  End Class

User · Answer

It doesn t when you start a long operation behind  because everything STOPS since you Re in the same thread

User · Answer

If you put it in a PictureBox control  it should just work

User · Answer

I had the same problem  Whole form  including gif  stopping to redraw itself because of long operation working in the background  Here is how i solved this     private void MyThreadRoutine          this Invoke this ShowProgressGifDelegate        your long running process    System Threading Thread Sleep 5000      this Invoke this HideProgressGifDelegate          private void button1 Click object sender  EventArgs e         ThreadStart myThreadStart   new ThreadStart MyThreadRoutine      Thread myThread   new Thread myThreadStart      myThread Start           I simply created another thread to be responsible for this operation  Thanks to this initial form continues redrawing without problems  including my gif working   ShowProgressGifDelegate and HideProgressGifDelegate are delegates in form that set visible property of pictureBox with gif to true false

User · Answer

I had the same issue and came across different solutions by implementing which I used to face several different issues  Finally  below is what I put some pieces from different posts together which worked for me as expected   private void btnCompare Click object sender  EventArgs e        ThreadStart threadStart   new ThreadStart Execution       Thread thread   new Thread threadStart       thread SetApartmentState ApartmentState STA       thread Start        Here is the Execution method that also carries invoking the PictureBox control   private void Execution         btnCompare Invoke  MethodInvoker delegate   pictureBox1 Visible   true          Application DoEvents            Your main code comes here            btnCompare Invoke  MethodInvoker delegate   pictureBox1 Visible   false          Keep in mind  the PictureBox is invisible from Properties Window or do below   private void ComparerForm Load object sender  EventArgs e        pictureBox1 Visible   false

User · Answer

Note that in Windows  you traditionally don t use animated Gifs  but little AVI animations  there is a Windows native control just to display them  There are even tools to convert animated Gifs to AVI  and vice-versa

User · Answer

It s not too hard   Drop a picturebox onto your form  Add the  gif file as the image in the picturebox Show the picturebox when you are loading   Things to take into consideration   Disabling the picturebox will prevent the gif from being animated   Animated gifs  If you are looking for animated gifs you can generate them  AjaxLoad - Ajax Loading gif generator Another way of doing it  Another way that I have found that works quite well is the async dialog control that I found on the code project

[c#] How do you show animated GIFs on a Windows Form (c#)

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