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

c# winforms animated-gif
Stuart Helwig picture Stuart Helwig · Oct 3, 2008 · Viewed 276.1k times · Source

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?

Answer

FryHard picture FryHard · Oct 3, 2008

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

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