.net transparent gif madness

I had to create an app that has some funky transparent image status indicators. Now initially I used png images while I was developing and testing with firefox. I figured that I would be able to generate a gif instead to deal with IE6's infamous lack of transparent png support.

Well while generating 32bit argb png's is quite easy with .net, generating a transparent gif is a major annoyance. Apparently .net 1.1 (I have no idea about 2.0) does not support transparency with indexed images. So where does that leave us? Well you can create another bitmap and muck with its color palette to force transparency. Once thats all set the only issue you're left with is the horrible color palette that was generated. I'm still working on that problem, as its a night and day difference in quality between the png and gif.

nota bene
gif only supports having one palette entry with 0 alpha (transparent).