Question

I write a code that read a png image from file and show with control.
I want read image from stream and set

control.BackgroundImage = Image.FromStream(memStream);

but when use this code , occur “out of memory” exception. but when use

control.Image = Image.FromStream(memStream);

or

control.BackgroundImage = Image.FromFile(fileSource);

, that is work.

image file size is 5KB.

 if (System.IO.File.Exists(imgSource))
 {
  using (FileStream localFileStream = new FileStream(imgSource, FileMode.Open))
  {
  using (MemoryStream memStream = new MemoryStream())
  {
   int bytesRead;
   byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];

   while ((bytesRead = localFileStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
   {
      memStream.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
   }
   retIMG = Image.FromStream(memStream);

   pictureBox1.Image = retIMG;      // is work
   label1.Image = retIMG;       // is work
   button1.Image = retIMG;      // is work
   button1.BackgroundImage = retIMG;    // don't work
   groupBox1.BackgroundImage = retIMG;  // don't work
   panel1.BackgroundImage = retIMG; // don't work
  }
  }
 }

I think a bug in .net framework.
please you help me?

Answer 1

Giving some background to add to DeCaf’s correct answer. GDI+ tries very hard to avoid copying the pixels of a bitmap. That’s expensive, bitmaps taking dozens of megabytes is not unusual. When you load a bitmap from a file with the Bitmap constructor or Image.FromFile() then GDI+ creates a memory-mapped file. The pixels are paged-in on demand, only when needed. Very efficient but it puts a lock on the file. Clearly you were trying to avoid that in lock in this code.

You indeed avoid that lock by loading the bytes into memory yourself with a MemoryStream. But the same principle still applies, GDI+ still doesn’t copy the pixels and only reads from the stream when it needs to. This goes wrong when you Dispose() the stream. Very hard to diagnose because the exception occurs later, typically when the bitmap needs to be drawn. It bombs in the painting code, you don’t have any code to look at but Application.Run(). With a crappy exception message, GDI+ only has a handful of error codes. You are not out of memory, it only looks that way to GDI+, it cannot otherwise figure out why the stream suddenly isn’t readable anymore.

At least part of the problem is caused by the very awkward implementation of MemoryStream.Dispose(). Dispose is meant to release unmanaged resources. A memory stream doesn’t have any, it only owns memory. That’s already taken care of by the garbage collector. Unfortunately they implemented it anyway. Not by actually disposing anything, since there’s nothing to dispose, but by marking the MemoryStream unreadable. Which triggers the error in GDI+ when it tries to read while drawing the bitmap.

So simply remove the using statement to avoid disposing the MemoryStream to solve your problem. And don’t fret about disposing it later when the bitmap is no longer in use. There’s nothing to dispose, the garbage collector automatically frees the memory.