With this GDI+ based, windowless control, designed as a replacement for Visual Basic's image control, you can display PNG, TIFF, TGA and alpha-blended XP-type icons. The control also supports common image formats such as bitmaps, icons, cursors, meta files, and JPGs. Premultiplied 32 bit bitmaps are supported, as well as multi-page TIFFs. No need for an extra control to display animated GIFs, this control can display those too. MP3 application designers, want a control that can display the embedded images within an MP3? This will do that too.

Ever want to display a custom background behind the image or possibly a watermark or custom border over the image?  No problem, the control will offer a set of events to enable this. The PrePaint event allows you to draw whatever you want onto the control before the image is drawn.  The PostPaint event allows you to draw whatever you want over the composite. This control will expose the image handle to the programmer. With your knowledge of GDI+, you can manipulate the control's DC via transformations to render the image in ways never before made available to programmers. The possibilities are endless.

The control includes common graphics effects also, gray scaling, rotation, shadowing, color blending/tinting, lightness addition or subtraction, proportional sizing and more. Like the image control, this control can share images between controls, reducing resource usage. Even though the images are shared, each can be drawn uniquely and in different sizes, rotations, or effects.

Images can be saved to bitmap, PNG or TIFF formats or the original format the image was loaded from. Images can be loaded from files, arrays, stdPicture objects, some memory handles, and the new stdGDIplusPicture class exposed by this control. Unciode file names and paths are supported. The control can also download and display images via a URL and include drag/dropped images.