Implementing a Simple Splash Screen in Windows Forms

This article shows how to implement a simple splash screen in Windows Forms.

Many Websites display a preloader splash screen before taking you to the actual content or page of the site. In the same manner, a desktop Windows Forms application can have a splash screen too that appears for some time before the actual form is displayed.

In this article, we will use a round-robin image display as a splash. This means that a series of images will keep appearing one after another on the splash screen automatically.

To begin with, create a Windows Forms application named SplashScreenDemo.

Add the ImageList component, Timer component, and PictureBox controls from the Toolbox on to the form. The ImageList component is used to store one or more images. The Timer component enables to specify a recurring interval at which the Elapsed event is raised in your application, or in other words, specifies the interval at which ticks occur. The PictureBox control is used to display an image.

Configure the properties of the ImageList as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Add the images present in the Sample Pictures folder (eg: C:\Documents and Settings\TEST\My Documents\My Pictures \Sample Pictures) to the ImageList. Figure 2 shows the outcome of this.

Figure 2

Configure the properties of the Timer as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

The interval is set to 900 millseconds. This means that a tick of the timer will occur every 900 milliseconds.

Set the event for the Timer as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4

Configure the properties of the PictureBox as shown in Figure 5. Here, you set the default picture to Blue Hills.jpg. This picture will be seen in the picturebox on loading the form.

Figure 5

Ensure that the size specified in the PictureBox for the image is the same as that specified in ImageList for ImageSize property.

Add code to the code-behind class as shown below (you need to add the bolded sections):

public partial class SplashForm : Form
    {
        private int index;
        public SplashForm()
        { 
           InitializeComponent();
        tmrSplash.Enabled = true;
        }

     private void tmrSplash_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
     {
           if (index > 3)
                index = 0;
            picBox.Image = imgPics.Images[index];
            picBox.SizeMode = PictureBoxSizeMode.StretchImage;
            picBox.Refresh(); 
            index++;
        }
    }

In this code, the timer component is enabled. An int variable is initialized to store the index of the images when we later iterate through the images in the Tick event handler. In this event handler, we check if the last image has been reached, if yes, we revert to the first image, else we continue. Each image from the ImageList is assigned to the picturebox one by one on each Tick of the timer. The image is stretched through the PictureBoxSizeMode.StretchImage property and the index is incremented.

Thus, the functionality to iterate through a group of images on each timer tick is created here.

Build and execute the application.

You will see a series of images appearing one after the other. This is a little similar to the Ad rotator functionality seen in many websites.

Conclusion: Thus, you saw how to create a simple splash screen in Windows Forms.