Loading Images in background while not locking the files - wpf

Question

My application loads a lot of images in a BackgroundWorker to stay usable. My Image control is bound to a property named "ImageSource". If this is null it's loaded in the background and raised again.
public ImageSource ImageSource
{
get
{
if (imageSource != null)
{
return imageSource;
}
if (!backgroundImageLoadWorker.IsBusy)
{
backgroundImageLoadWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(bw_DoWork);
backgroundImageLoadWorker.RunWorkerCompleted +=
new RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(bw_RunWorkerCompleted);
backgroundImageLoadWorker.RunWorkerAsync();
}
return imageSource;
}
}
void bw_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
{
bitmap = new BitmapImage();
bitmap.BeginInit();
try
{
bitmap.CreateOptions = BitmapCreateOptions.DelayCreation;
bitmap.DecodePixelWidth = 300;
MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
byte[] fileContent = File.ReadAllBytes(imagePath);
memoryStream.Write(fileContent, 0, fileContent.Length);
memoryStream.Position = 0;
bitmap.StreamSource = memoryStream;
}
finally
{
bitmap.EndInit();
}
bitmap.Freeze();
e.Result = bitmap;
}
void bw_RunWorkerCompleted(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
{
BitmapSource bitmap = e.Result as BitmapSource;
if (bitmap != null)
{
Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvoke(
(ThreadStart)delegate()
{
imageSource = bitmap;
RaisePropertyChanged("ImageSource");
}, DispatcherPriority.Normal);
}
}
This is all well so far but my users can change the images in question. They choose a new image in an OpenDialog, the old image file is overwritten with the new and ImageSource is raised again which loads the new image with the same filename again:
public string ImagePath
{
get { return imagePath; }
set
{
imagePath= value;
imageSource = null;
RaisePropertyChanged("ImageSource");
}
}
On some systems the overwriting of the old file results in an exception:
"a generic error occured in GDI+" and "The process cannot access the file..."
I tried a lot of things like loading with BitmapCreateOptions.IgnoreImageCache and BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad. This raised Exceptions when loading them:
Key cannot be null.
Parameter name: key
If I try this without the BackgroundWorker on the UI thread it works fine. Am I doing something wrong? Isn't it possible to load the images in the background while keeping the files unlocked?

Answer 1

Well, it seems all of the above works. I simplified the example for the question and somehow on the way lost the problem.
The only difference I could see in my code is that the loading of the image itself was delegated to a specific image loader class which somehow created the problem. When I removed this dependency the errors disappeared.