Capture image of hidden process, is concept possible?

[TokersBall_CDXX]

Been throwing around concepts lately at attempting this but haven't been able to come up with anything that actually works. The concept: Capture an image of a process that is hidden.

any thoughts?

[Grimfort]

What now? Maybe you should explain what that means first. To you, what is a hidden process, what do you believe is an image of a process?

[TokersBall_CDXX]

What now? Maybe you should explain what that means first. To you, what is a hidden process, what do you believe is an image of a process?

a hidden process being any application that has been launched in vb.net where the process' windowstyle is set to hidden

ProcessProperties.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden

and an image of this hidden process is somewhat of a screen capture of this application, how ever it would have to be something different than a screen capture as hidden applications do not render anything to the screen.

[Grimfort]

This makes an image of a given form, as for would it work when hidden, I guess you would have to try it.

Dim imgDefaultForm As New Bitmap(Form1.ClientRectangle.Width, Form1.ClientRectangle.Height, Imaging.PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb)
Form1.DrawToBitmap(imgDefaultForm, Form1.ClientRectangle)

[cicatrix]

I don't think it will be possible, because with that property set to true - there's no window.
Well, perhaps there is some window handle (hWnd) to it, but not much more. No WM_PAINT messages are sent, - there's no window procedure which catches them and call the actual drawing APIs.
While there may be a window in the operating system terms, but if the window is not drawn (and it's not drawn because OS won't spend the CPU time to draw what's invisible) there really won't be anything to capture.

[TokersBall_CDXX]

I don't think it will be possible, because with that property set to true - there's no window.
Well, perhaps there is some window handle (hWnd) to it, but not much more. No WM_PAINT messages are sent, - there's no window procedure which catches them and call the actual drawing APIs.
While there may be a window in the operating system terms, but if the window is not drawn (and it's not drawn because OS won't spend the CPU time to draw what's invisible) there really won't be anything to capture.

exactly the issue I've been running into, though consider the application found on this website
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/web_site_screenshot.html

I'd like to expand on this idea, not just IE or browsers for that matter..
the website doesn't go into much detail about how the application actually does what it does but it specifically states it creates a hidden window of IE and saves an Image of the webpage...

[cicatrix]

I think that that program uses some html parsing engine (like WebKit, for example) and actually downloads the page, and renders it, but not on a visible window but on some kind of in-memory bitmap.
Capturing an emty space won't help in this case. You download the page, you download pictures from <img src...> and then you actually draw this page on some kind of 'canvas' like bitmap.

Even if it creates a hidden IE window it doesn't 'capture' it - is saves it or renders it somewhere.

[TokersBall_CDXX]

if i load http://tools.sopili.net/get-browser-info/ with the tool which shows you what browser and version details is used to load the page, it clearly shows IE is the browser...

though I suspect it may be possible that they may be using the IE web browser component? though it still brings forward the thought of how this is being done with out any WM_Paint calls or the like?

[Grimfort]

The WebBrowser component is IE, however, you can send anything you like in a webrequest and pretend to be IE7, IE8, firefox, IE20001, whatever. Its just part of the request you send to a website.