When working with Windows forms and images, I deal with System.Drawing.Image descendats.
When I work with WPF I deal with System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapSource class.
Is there a UI framework independent way of referencing a memory image?
Maybe it would be a Intptr or byte array?
Thank you.
You should be able to get them both to work with a MemoryStream pointing at a byte array (makes sense to me anyway!)
Haven't tried the WinForms way, but you can certainly do that with WPF.
Related
I have a native codebase that creates an image every 50 ms. I want to use WPF to render this image into a WPF GUI view.
The image is an hbitmap constructed from a data structure of type boost::numeric::ublas::matrix. i.e. I start with a matrix of float values, then I create a HBITMAP, and then draw this HBITMAP using the device context of MFC. But now, I want to replace my MFC GUI with a WPF GUI, because it looks nicer. I plan to use C++/CLI to achieve the interop.
My question is as follows : How should I setup the transfer of my image across the interop boundary?
Should I transfer it over while it is still a structure of floats, or shall I transfer after I created the bitmap? I have heard marshaling is a big drain on efficiency, and so must be handled very carefully. Is there a type that is common to managed and native world, that can be used for this?
I am a complete newbie to interoping, any other related resources you share will be greatly appreciated.
Or, is there a way to completely avoid the transfer? - by drawing from native code into a WPF GUI view
My application is very performance sensitive, any alternative you suggest that achieves good performance will be greatly appreciated.
I've been through the same options and found that - at least for .NET 4.5 - the InteropBitmap is the best way to go, as long as your image stays the same size (e.g. for something like video streaming).
In brief, you create a memory mapped file (either in using C++/CLI or C# with p/invoke), and use that as the source of pixel data. The InteropBitmap is created over that same memory mapped file, and you can use it as an ImageSource in WPF.
In my application, a background thread updates the MMF and invalidates the InteropBitmap and the WPF front end just binds to the image source as normal.
I just don't quite know how to handle this situation I'm dealing with.
I have a image of terrain tiles. In fact, here is a picture of it:
I've been working on my Map Editor for my game which has some windows forms in it like this:
Now, the problem is that both the XNA and the Windows Forms needs the image of the sprite tiles. Is there a way to handle this nicely or am I going to have to have two copies of the image (one for the WinForms and one for the XNA)?
Thanks for the help!
You don't need two copies of the image. Have you looked at the WinForms examples on AppHub?
http://create.msdn.com/education/catalog/sample/winforms_series_2
One of the projects I work on has some pre-existing reports that are printed via MFC's printing support and rendered more or less directly to a printer DC via GDI. We've started doing some new (unrelated) reports via WPF/XAML since we're transitioning new UI to WPF anyway and it's so much better to work with for layout.
The other shoe has finally dropped, and I've got the need to add some new functionality to an existing printed report, and the new functionality practically begs to be implemented with WPF. Our existing WPF reports are implemented via XAML pages sent to an XpsDocument (in-memory, not on disk) via XpsDocumentWriter. I would like to be able to continue to use this strategy, and take the approach of writing WPF/XAML reports that happen to have some pages rendered via GDI.
My first naive attempt was to embed an HwndHost in the UIElement that gets rendered in the XpsDocumentWriter, but that doesn't seem to work. No surprise but it was worth a try.
The next obvious solution, IMO, would be to render the GDI graphics to an appropriate sized and scaled bitmap, and render that bitmap to a page in the XpsDocument. That would work, but page-sized bitmaps (especially in-memory ones) seem like a recipe for high memory usage and poor performance on slower computers.
Ideally I'd like to render the GDI content to a metafile or some other vector format that could then be translated to XPS. But this has to be an automatic process that works every time since it's just a document printing feature. OTOH it's an application for in-house users so we can put up with some performance degredation
WPF development is not my main task, so I'd describe myself as a novice without much detailed knowledge of the underlying details. I just wanted to make sure I'm not missing something obvious before I revert to using a bitmap as the transfer medium, although I haven't turned up any other decent options in my search so far.
Anything I should be looking into?
One way of doing this would be to create a WriteableBitmap in WPF and blit the GDI drawn image directly to it so it can be rendered in your XPS document. An initial step could be to do a straight blit from your GDI DC (get a pointer to GDI DC, pointer to WriteableBitmap and use Platform Invoke to call memcpy). Later work could involve converting the MFC GDI drawing to vanilla WPF (using a library such as WriteableBitmapEx which has gdi like drawing methods).
Although the first approach above would involve two bitmaps, its the best way I can currently think of without a huge re-write. The second method may or may not be possible out of the box, since WriteableBitmaps's drawing support is not as extended as GDI. A final method I just thought of would be to use GDI via Platform Invoke and draw directly on the WriteableBitmap surface. This would allow a port without a massive re-write and would give you the performance you need, while keeping the code familiar.
This is my first Silverlight app and my first go at C#. I have a C# class library that I access from Silverlight using COM. The C# library has a method that takes a Bitmap as an argument, however from what I can see Silverlight only has a WritableBitmap. Is there a way to convert a WritableBitmap to a Bitmap in Silverlight? Some other answers I have read give functions for the conversion, but the functions all return a Bitmap, which obviously throws an error when I try and build. Can anyone help?
Finally got it working by converting the WritableBitmap into a byte array, passing it through and then building the bitmap again on the other side.
I want to make sure I am understanding you correctly, you are using Silverlight to talk to a C# windows library using COM, the c# libraru is using classes that Silverlight does not have any references to, correct?
If this is the case, I would immediately look into using WPF instead of Silverlight, can you do this? The Bitmap class is really just a wrapper for a GDI+ image, which is why you wont really be able to use it in Silverlight.
I'm trying to cross compile some libraries for WPF and Silverlight.
Currently one of the libraries depends on System.Drawing.Bitmap which is not available in Silverlight.
It's a class that represents a device specific image format,
and holds a reference to a Bitmap instance in order to display this image
in a WPF application.
What could I use instead of the Bitmap class in order to hold a reference
to an Image which I can display in both silverlight and wpf ? (cannot be file based, must be in memory).
System.Windows.Media.Imaging for WPF and Silverlight. This one shows how to work with it in memory: Silverlight 4.0: How to convert byte[] to image?
The closest you will get is the WriteableBitmap class but these classes a quite different between frameworks. If you are looking to create a common library to use in both your WPF and Silverlight applications you will probably need to create an abstract that your applications code to and then write two different implementations of the abstract.
If both chunks of code return something tha,t at least lexically, is a "WriteableBitmap" then you might be able to integrate that into common code.
Worth looking at for the Silverlight side of the implementation would be WriteableBitmapEx.