I like GDI+ because its high performance and it's included with Windows XP. However, its blur class and effect class is only available in GDI+ 1.1, which only comes with Windows Vista or later. Despite the fact that Microsoft plans to drop support for Windows XP soon, there are still a large percentage of people who are still sticking with XP. If you make any consumer-targeted software, you have to support Windows XP. But unfortunately, GDI+ 1.1 is not redistributable under XP.
I tried a couple of opensource image libraries. However, when it comes to performance, for example, the gaussian blurring operation, they are significantly slower than gdi+.
Can anyone recommend a better alternative to GDI+ with XP support?