Question

I need to load 101 bitmaps from the filesystem (they can’t be built into the app as a resource as they will be changed for each run of the program) into a windows form application picturebox sequentially based on short duration timer events (500ms give or take) .

Essentially it should work like a slow animation but it is critical that every image be shown.

I’ve roughed out a simple application in C# to do this however it seems that the image loading and displaying is taking longer than the 500ms so some images are never displayed.

Is there some way I can avoid this? Preloading or creating 101 pictureboxes and showing and hiding?

Anybody have any suggestions?

Answer 1

What’s taking the longest? Image loading or displaying? Are you loading each image when it needs displaying? A look at your code would be really valuable.

If you are certain that it will always be exactly 101 images, load them all into an array of System.Drawing.Bitmap first then have an iterator variable that gets incremented on each call of the Tick event of a Timer. Have this Tick event load the image from the array into the PictureBox using PictureBox.Image = myBitmapArray[iterator] If you increment the iterator using ++i%=101; you won’t get an OutOfBounds error and the animation will loop.