Display image from internet in a Picturebox

[kleinma]

'WEB CLIENT IS NEEDED TO DO THE DOWNLOAD
        Dim MyWebClient As New System.Net.WebClient
 
        'BYTE ARRAY HOLDS THE DATA
        Dim ImageInBytes() As Byte = MyWebClient.DownloadData(TextBox1.Text)
 
        'CREATE A MEMORY STREAM USING THE BYTES
        Dim ImageStream As New IO.MemoryStream(ImageInBytes)
 
        'CREATE A BITMAP FROM THE MEMORY STREAM
        PictureBox1.Image = New System.Drawing.Bitmap(ImageStream)
 
        'AS U SEE, NO FILE NEEDS TO BE WRITTEN TO THE HARD DRIVE, ITS ALL DONE IN MEMORY

Or to merge all that into 1 line of code

PictureBox1.Image = New System.Drawing.Bitmap(New IO.MemoryStream(New System.Net.WebClient().DownloadData(TextBox1.Text)))

Assumes there is a textbox called textbox1 and a picturebox called picturebox1 on a form. Textbox1.text should be the URL of the picture.

This shows how you can grab a picture off the web in .NET 1.1 and display it in a picturebox without actually having to save the image to file first. It uses a memory stream so no data has to be physically written to the drive to then be displayed.

The example uses an image, and a picturebox, but you can see how this could be applied to other file types and used with other classes that can be created via a stream or bytes.