Capture screenshot of active window?

Question

I am making a screen capturing application and everything is going fine. All I need to do is capture the active window and take a screenshot of this active window. Does an

Answer 1

Based on ArsenMkrt's reply, but this one allows you to capture a control in your form (I'm writing a tool for example that has a WebBrowser control in it and want to capture just its display). Note the use of PointToScreen method:

//Project: WebCapture
//Filename: ScreenshotUtils.cs
//Author: George Birbilis (http://zoomicon.com)
//Version: 20130820

using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace WebCapture
{
  public static class ScreenshotUtils
  {

    public static Rectangle Offseted(this Rectangle r, Point p)
    {
      r.Offset(p);
      return r;
    }

    public static Bitmap GetScreenshot(this Control c)
    {
      return GetScreenshot(new Rectangle(c.PointToScreen(Point.Empty), c.Size));
    }

    public static Bitmap GetScreenshot(Rectangle bounds)
    {
      Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(bounds.Width, bounds.Height);
      using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bitmap))
        g.CopyFromScreen(new Point(bounds.Left, bounds.Top), Point.Empty, bounds.Size);
      return bitmap;
    }

    public const string DEFAULT_IMAGESAVEFILEDIALOG_TITLE = "Save image";
    public const string DEFAULT_IMAGESAVEFILEDIALOG_FILTER = "PNG Image (*.png)|*.png|JPEG Image (*.jpg)|*.jpg|Bitmap Image (*.bmp)|*.bmp|GIF Image (*.gif)|*.gif";

    public const string CUSTOMPLACES_COMPUTER = "0AC0837C-BBF8-452A-850D-79D08E667CA7";
    public const string CUSTOMPLACES_DESKTOP = "B4BFCC3A-DB2C-424C-B029-7FE99A87C641";
    public const string CUSTOMPLACES_DOCUMENTS = "FDD39AD0-238F-46AF-ADB4-6C85480369C7";
    public const string CUSTOMPLACES_PICTURES = "33E28130-4E1E-4676-835A-98395C3BC3BB";
    public const string CUSTOMPLACES_PUBLICPICTURES = "B6EBFB86-6907-413C-9AF7-4FC2ABF07CC5";
    public const string CUSTOMPLACES_RECENT = "AE50C081-EBD2-438A-8655-8A092E34987A";

    public static SaveFileDialog GetImageSaveFileDialog(
      string title = DEFAULT_IMAGESAVEFILEDIALOG_TITLE, 
      string filter = DEFAULT_IMAGESAVEFILEDIALOG_FILTER)
    {
      SaveFileDialog dialog = new SaveFileDialog();

      dialog.Title = title;
      dialog.Filter = filter;


      /* //this seems to throw error on Windows Server 2008 R2, must be for Windows Vista only
      dialog.CustomPlaces.Add(CUSTOMPLACES_COMPUTER);
      dialog.CustomPlaces.Add(CUSTOMPLACES_DESKTOP);
      dialog.CustomPlaces.Add(CUSTOMPLACES_DOCUMENTS);
      dialog.CustomPlaces.Add(CUSTOMPLACES_PICTURES);
      dialog.CustomPlaces.Add(CUSTOMPLACES_PUBLICPICTURES);
      dialog.CustomPlaces.Add(CUSTOMPLACES_RECENT);
      */

      return dialog;
    }

    public static void ShowSaveFileDialog(this Image image, IWin32Window owner = null)
    {
      using (SaveFileDialog dlg = GetImageSaveFileDialog())
        if (dlg.ShowDialog(owner) == DialogResult.OK)
          image.Save(dlg.FileName);
    }

  }
}

Having the Bitmap object you can just call Save on it

private void btnCapture_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  webBrowser.GetScreenshot().Save("C://test.jpg", ImageFormat.Jpeg);
}

The above assumes the GC will grab the bitmap, but maybe it's better to assign the result of someControl.getScreenshot() to a Bitmap variable, then dispose that variable manually when finished with each image, especially if you're doing this grabbing often (say you have a list of webpages you want to load and save screenshots of them):

private void btnCapture_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  Bitmap bitmap = webBrowser.GetScreenshot();
  bitmap.ShowSaveFileDialog();
  bitmap.Dispose(); //release bitmap resources
}

Even better, could employ a using clause, which has the added benefit of releasing the bitmap resources even in case of an exception occuring inside the using (child) block:

private void btnCapture_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  using(Bitmap bitmap = webBrowser.GetScreenshot())
    bitmap.ShowSaveFileDialog();
  //exit from using block will release bitmap resources even if exception occured
}

Update:

Now WebCapture tool is ClickOnce-deployed (http://gallery.clipflair.net/WebCapture) from the web (also has nice autoupdate support thanks to ClickOnce) and you can find its source code at https://github.com/Zoomicon/ClipFlair/tree/master/Server/Tools/WebCapture