Capture screen of Windows store App

Question

Is it possible to capture the contents of running Windows store app? I need to capture the entire screen or a user defined rectangular area.

1. The application will provide share option
2. When the application is running and share option is selected, I want to get the screen shot periodically say 4 times in a second
3. This screen shot image will be posted to server, which will store the same

Answer 1

It's now possible in Windows 8.1 to capture the screen of a Store App. You need to use the RenderTargetBitmap class.

You can find an example here: http://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2013/11/05/render-the-screen-of-a-windows-store-app-to-a-bitmap-in-windows-8-1/

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

There is no built-in mechanism to render Windows 8 XAML UI to a bitmap in Windows 8.0. Depending on how complicated your UI is you could implement your own composition engine to render your UI to a bitmap using Direct2D or use the WinRT XAML Toolkit WriteableBitmap.Render() method implementation which has a limited support for doing what you ask (it doesn't render all types of controls, doesn't support RenderTransform, etc.). You could update it though to add support for the missing features.

Windows 8.1 APIs include the new 'RenderTargetBitmap' class that allows to render to a bitmap with its RenderAsync methods.

Answer 3

You can't capture screen programatically. See the below threads from MSDN.

Programmatically take snap shot Windows RT.

How to capture screen in Metro app?