I've looked around a lot and the only methods I've found for creating a Texture2D from a Bitmap are:

using  (MemoryStream s = new  MemoryStream())
{
   bmp.Save(s, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png);
   s.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
   Texture2D tx = Texture2D.FromFile(device, s);
}

and

Texture2D tx = new Texture2D(device, bmp.Width, bmp.Height,
                        0, TextureUsage.None, SurfaceFormat.Color);
tx.SetData<byte>(rgbValues, 0, rgbValues.Length, SetDataOptions.NoOverwrite);

Where rgbValues is a byte array containing the bitmap's pixel data in 32-bit ARGB format.

My question is, are there any faster approaches that I can try?

I am writing a map editor which has to read in custom-format images (map tiles) and convert them into Texture2D textures to display. The previous version of the editor, which was a C++ implementation, converted the images first into bitmaps and then into textures to be drawn using DirectX. I have attempted the same approach here, however both of the above approaches are significantly too slow. To load into memory all of the textures required for a map takes for the first approach ~250 seconds and for the second approach ~110 seconds on a reasonable spec computer. If there is a method to edit the data of a texture directly (such as with the Bitmap class's LockBits method) then I would be able to convert the custom-format images straight into a Texture2D and hopefully save processing time.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks