Screenshot Application

[s-c]

I guess this is a series of question that will form the final result.

1. Is it possible to control other installed applications using VB.NET (I am thinking primarily about web browsers such as IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari)?
2. If so, is there any limitation of control using VB.NET with these applications?
3. How hard is this stuff to do?

I ask these questions because I see some of the other posts on the forums show that screenshots are relatively simple.

Specifically:
Uploading Screenshots

What I am trying to do is output PNG screenshots of just what is in the browser (IE, FF, Opera, Safari) window at several different resolutions (say 800x600, 1024,768, 1400x900, etc).

I know there is software out there called Url2BMP which does this for you, but I'm looking for a little more than that in which I can hook up to my web interface that I am currently developing.

IS the process of taking the screenshots still simple when controlling another application, or do they somehow get tougher, since much of what I am trying to do is dynamic.

I'd like to open this up for some general conversation about the different methods I could go about doing this.

Thanks

 

[ss7thirty]

As far as getting these images into the PNG format I am sure that you will have to do some sort of conversion..However, this is possible with some windows API calls. In this thread this was talked about and the person even provided a sample. Here is the link:

http://www.vbdotnetforums.com/showthread.php?t=20438

 

[JuggaloBrotha]

saving it as png is easy, once you have your bitmap object with the image you need simply call the bitmap object's save method, passing it a file name and format type:

.Save("c:\source.png", Imaging.ImageFormat.Png)

 

[s-c]

Sweet. Sounds great. That part of my problem is solved.

So now it goes into what I would be imagine to be the harder part.

What does it take to control the applications such as the browsers I mentioned above?

sc

 

[ss7thirty]

What exactly do you mean by control...Please explain further..

 

[JuggaloBrotha]

this thread has some code that does some sort of screen shots: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=478591

 

[s-c]

What exactly do you mean by control...Please explain further..

Take URL2BMP for example (link can be found in the first post in this thread)

They use a windows browser control to view the web page within their application. To take a screenshot of the whole page, they must scroll down the page to get the whole thing.

How can that be done with a variety of browsers?


sc

 

[Cheetah]

Cant you just shell (Process.Start) the browsers with the url as the command, take the screenshot and then close them again?

 

[ss7thirty]

This may be possible give it a try. But for future reference Shell is different than Process.Start(). Shell is an older command and should not be used. But I would not see why you would not be able to do this. It works for most applications and you can just pass the path to the file you wish to open it with. So why not give it a try with web browsers.