What's the relationship between WIC and GDI+?

Question

I'm fuzzy on the relationship between Windows Imaging Component (WIC) and GDI+. I've done some work in the past that showed that, for example, WIC produces visually superior GIF encodings, but I'm surprised I don't see more people using it for image processing vs. GDI+. I know it doesn't have GDI+'s draw operations, but for encoding/decoding it seems superior. So why don't we see a migration?

Answer 1

The relationship (or rather the difference between) WIC and GDI+ is that WIC is an extensible imaging codec framework which allows applications implementing the framework to receive support for new image formats via provided codecs. GDI+ is a core component of Windows which supports draw operations such as lines, fonts, gradients, etc.

While GDI+ has native support for several common image formats, WIC codecs can be provided for any image format.

Answer 2

I understood that GDI+ uses WIC to perform certain tasks. At least, in Windows 7 it does.

Please consider the following code:

image.Write(target, ImageFormat.Gif);

When I run this code under Windows XP it will use the GDI+ Gif encoder to write the image as a Gif. When I run the same code under Windows 7 it will use the WIC Gif Encoder.