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I've created an WPF based application showing me thumbnails of external windows. As an example i pick up icq, firefox and some other windows, create thumbnails of these and render them onto my WPF based application. That works fine already and looks like this: http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/1170/oijoijio.jpg (Just showing one thumbnail in here, but there will be multiple in future)

The WPF application will also contain some controls to actually select the windows being "thumbnailed" and a few others.

The next step and my actual question is about how i would redirect these content being rendered into a Bitmap instead of the "WPF window" itself. Is there a way to accomblish that goal? All the windows content (WPF containers and the drawn thumbnails) need to be rendered into a bitmap which i can display in directx window being owned by a game.

I know that it is possible todo that somehow, as a programm called overwolf also uses WPF inside of their application. They actually install device inline detours to hook into the rendering process of the game, where they render their wpf content. I am not sure if they use some kind of bitmap they render in there, or if they directly render the wpf content onto the dx-surface somehow.

Other ideas besides the bitmap based style i plan to go for are welcome aswell! Thanks for your reading until here, and another big hug for any answer :)

Frank Teklote
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1 Answers1

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Any WPF Visual object can be rendered into a bitmap using RenderTargetBitmap.

arx
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  • Do you mean the complete window including the title bar, borders, etc. or the complete content of the window? – arx Feb 08 '12 at 19:05
  • Just the content. But notice that the DWM Api does not "place" its thumbnail into some WPF container, but renders ontop of the window itself. Thats prolly some other render context as the WPFs application one – Frank Teklote Feb 08 '12 at 23:01
  • Sorry, I completely misunderstood your question. What you actually seem to be asking is "can I render a DWM thumbnail to a bitmap"; it's only tangentially related to WPF. This question suggests that the answer is no: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2196268/is-it-possible-to-capture-a-window-with-windows-7-dwm-thumbnail-in-it – arx Feb 09 '12 at 00:41
  • Appreciate the link, but still no idea how to use it. Okay so I create a `new RenderTargetBitmap`, but nowhere does it say how what window to render the bitmap from. – The Muffin Man Oct 27 '20 at 22:46