CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.net
user9993
user9993

Reputation: 6170

C# Portable Class Libraries - Using images

I'm writing a library which makes use of a web API to download images. I need this library to be useable on a number of platforms, so I'm opting for a portable class library. Normally I would use the Bitmap type from System.Drawing to store the downloaded image in memory to then be passed to a method etc.

However, PCL's don't have access to this class because of their platform independent manner. Therefore, I was thinking of simply downloading the images into a byte[] array which would then be used by the application using the library. Will there be any potential problems with using a byte array to hold the downloaded images?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1267

Answers (1)

Mayank
Mayank

Reputation: 8852

I don't believe there is any major potential problem in using byte[] to store images.

Only one thing that I can think of is some potential overhead of converting images to byte[] and back.

Also I can't think of any better way to store the images other then in a byte[].

Plus you can write an extension method for the data class that holds byte[] to return Bitmap where you can use it.

public static class DataClassExtensions
{
     public static BitmapImage GetImage(this DataClass data)
     {
         if(data == null || data.ImageArray == null) return null;

         using (var ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream(data.ImageArray))
         {
              Bitmap image = (Bitmap)Image.FromStream(ms);
              return image;
         }
     }
}

public class DataClass
{
     public byte[] ImageArray { get; set; }
}

Upvotes: 3

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