Hi Daniel,

Writing to and reading from XML works fine with my test PNG image. Please email me yours so we can test that here.

Regards,
Stoyan

Hi Daniel,

It seems the .NET's PNG encoder requires the original image data to be still around when saving the image.

E.g. if you load the image from a file and save the diagram in binary or XML format, then load the diagram and the background will be transparent. That will also work if you load the image from the application resources, and keep the resource stream opened while the application runs.

If you use the images from a PictureBox, their resource stream will be closed when the PictureBox loads, so serialization won't work as expected.

Another possibility is to create a ShapeTemplate instance for each image and set the ShapeTemplate.Image property. Do that each time your application starts. That will make the flowchart serialize only the shape template id, without encoding the images in binary or XML files at all. That will also help you keep the diagram files smaller.

I hope that helps,
Stoyan