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

Question

It's not too hard.

1. Drop a picturebox onto your form.
2. Add the .gif file as the image in the picturebox
3. 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

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.

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).

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

It doesn't when you start a long operation behind, because everything STOPS since you'Re in the same thread.

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