Silverlight Embedded ImageBrush not rendering when saved as WriteableBitmap - silverlight

Question

I have an Silverlight application that would create a canvas, save the canvas as a WriteableBitmap and send the WriteableBitmap as a MemoryStream to the server side in order to embed the image inside of an email.
Everything works fine until I get a new requirement that I have to show certain images (Image brush with URL pointing to some image files, to avoid confusion, let's call it GreenIconBrush) inside of the canvas. Now, the canvas was rendering fine on the Silverlight side, however, in the email, everything showed up except the GreenIconBrush.
The canvas consists of an ItemsControl which uses DataTemplate. Depending on the data, I will load different ImageBrush which are defined as follows:
Resource:
<ImageBursh x:key="GreenIconBrush" ImageSource="Images/TrafficLightGreen.png"/>
Xaml:
<Grid>
<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding}">
<ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
<DataTemplate>
<Grid>
<Border Background="Binding ScoreByIconColor, Converter={StaticResource ScoreColorToBrushColorConverter}">
</Border>
</Grid>
</DataTemplate>
</ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
</ItemsControl>
</Grid>
Converter:
<Converts:ValueMapperConverter x:Key="ScoreColorToBrushConverter">
<Converts:ValueMapperConverter.Map>
<Converts:MappedItem key="green" Value="{StaticResource GreenIconBrush}" />
</Converts:ValueMapperConverter.Map>
</Converts:ValueMapperConverter>
Here is the code that renders the image on the canvas and create WriteableBitmap and call the web service to send email
ScoreCard target = new ScoreCard();
setupScoreCard(target, data);
target.UpdateLayout();
canvas.Children.Add(target);
canvas.UpdateLayout();
WriteableBitmap bitmap = new WriteableBitmap(canvas, null);
// bitmap.Invalidate(); <- tried this, does not help
MemoryStream stream = (MemoryStream)SaveToStream(bitmap);
stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
data.ScoreCard = ReadToEnd(stream);
wcfService.SendEmailAsync(data);
On the web service side:
MailMessage msg = new MailMessage();
// setup to, from, SmtpClient, etc.
msg.IsBodyHtml = true;
AlternateView view = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(emailTemplate.ToString(), null, MediaTypeNames.Text.Html);
MemoryStream fs = new MemoryStream();
fs.Write(data.ScoreCard, 0, data.ScoreCard.Length);
fs.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
LinkedResource pic = new LinkedResource(fs, new System.Net.Mine.ContentType("image/png");
view.LinkedResources.Add(pic);
msg.AlternateViews.Add(view);
smtp.Send(msg);
I suspect the issue is related to the ImageBrush was not Rendered when I save the canvas to WriteableBitmap but I tried InvalidateMeasure(), InvalidateArrange() on both target and canvas and I even tried to apply transformation and Invalidate the WriteableBitmap but nothing worked.
Please help...
Sincerely,
Charlie Chang

Answer 1

Well, the problem is that the embedded PNG file does not get rendered on the canvas and become part of the writeablebitmap when I send it to the server side to be send in the email.
After wasting many hours trying to make this work, I decided just to recreate the images in Xaml (convert image to Xaml - vector was not a good idea either for you lose too much quality) and everything works fine now.
Charlie