Screen scraping a mainframe screen in C# *without* 3rd-party utilities

Question

I\'m looking to screen scrape a 3270 mainframe application in C#, but I\'ve got to do so without Attachmate or other 3rd party plugins. Are there free managed libraries to do so

Answer 1

I'm going to operate under two assumptions here.

1. By screen scraping you not only mean getting a screen shot but then deciphering text and other items on the screen.
2. You can't use 3rd party utilities because you don't want to install them on the system.

It makes zero sense to try to write your own OCR stuff and any other approaches to grabbing data off a mainframe app are going to be buggy at best. If I were you, I would write a C# app that grabs a screen shot and sends it to a web service. The web service uses a 3rd party utility to screen scrape the screen shot and sends back the appropriate data to the application.