How do I get an animated gif to work in WPF?

Question

What control type should I use - Image, MediaElement, etc.?

Answer 1

Thanks for your post Joel, it helped me solve WPF's absence of support for animated GIFs. Just adding a little code since I had a heck of a time with setting the pictureBoxLoading.Image property due to the Winforms api.

I had to set my animated gif image's Build Action as "Content" and the Copy to output directory to "Copy if newer" or "always". Then in the MainWindow() I called this method. Only issue is that when I tried to dispose of the stream, it gave me a red envelope graphic instead of my image. I'll have to solve that problem. This removed the pain of loading a BitmapImage and changing it into a Bitmap (which obviously killed my animation because it is no longer a gif).

private void SetupProgressIcon()
{
   Uri uri = new Uri("pack://application:,,,/WPFTest;component/Images/animated_progress_apple.gif");
   if (uri != null)
   {
      Stream stream = Application.GetContentStream(uri).Stream;   
      imgProgressBox.Image = new System.Drawing.Bitmap(stream);
   }
}