How to convert icon (Bitmap) to ImageSource?

Question

I have a button and an image named as image1 in my wpf app. I want add image source of the image1 from a file icon of a location or file path. Here is my code:

Answer 1

The solution suggested by Farhan Anam will work, but it's not ideal: the icon is loaded from a file, converted to a bitmap, saved to a stream and reloaded from the stream. That's quite inefficient.

Another approach is to use the System.Windows.Interop.Imaging class and its CreateBitmapSourceFromHIcon method:

private ImageSource IconToImageSource(System.Drawing.Icon icon)
{
    return Imaging.CreateBitmapSourceFromHIcon(
        icon.Handle,
        new Int32Rect(0, 0, icon.Width, icon.Height),
        BitmapSizeOptions.FromEmptyOptions());
}

private void Button_Click_1(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    using (var ico = System.Drawing.Icon.ExtractAssociatedIcon(@"C:\WINDOWS\system32\notepad.exe"))
    {
        image1.Source = IconToImageSource(ico);
    }
}

Note the using block to dispose the original icon after you converted it. Not doing this will cause handle leaks.

Answer 2

The error you get is because you try to assign a bitmap as the source of an image. To rectify that, use this function:

BitmapImage BitmapToImageSource(Bitmap bitmap)
{
    using (MemoryStream memory = new MemoryStream())
    {
        bitmap.Save(memory, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Bmp);
        memory.Position = 0;
        BitmapImage bitmapimage = new BitmapImage();
        bitmapimage.BeginInit();
        bitmapimage.StreamSource = memory;
        bitmapimage.CacheOption = BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad;
        bitmapimage.EndInit();

        return bitmapimage;
    }
}

like this:

image1.Source = BitmapToImageSource(ico.ToBitmap());