CodeProject: Screen Shot Application. Free source code and programming help

Screen Shot has been created with Visual Basic.NET 2005. The application is user friendly and easy to use. It allows the user to capture still images from the screen and save them into the user predefined folder. I find it very useful with some music visualizations when I need to take screen shots.

Screen Shot Feature List

Full screen image capture (all monitors).
Object capture. The object can be window, control, Windows shortcut menu etc.
Rectangle-area image capture from the screen.
Clipboard image capture.
Active window image capture (with a hot key).
User defined application hot keys.
All these captured images are (automatically or manually) saved into the user defined folder or clipboard.
All the capture methods mentioned above will capture transparent images from the screen.
JPG Image quality setting.
Can save the image in many image formats.
Easy menu access (optional).
Plays sound when the image is captured (optional).
Automatically notifies for application updates (optional).
Starts the Screen Shot automatically when the system starts (optional).
Help (help file).

Screen Shot Main Menu

The main menu has five buttons, which I will explain in the order shown below. The menu is located on the top-center of the screen that hides itself when it loses the mouse focus.

Capture Mode

The first button is the Capture Mode button. In Screen Shot, to capture an image the capture mode should be set first. The button is a split-dropdown button that has the following items:

As you can guess from the above picture, the first dropdown item sets the "Full Screen" capture mode, the second sets the "Object" capture mode and the third one sets the "Rectangle" area capture mode.

The fourth menu item is not for setting the capture mode but for capturing the clipboard image. After selecting the desired capture mode, you will notice that the "Mode" button's image is changed to the menu item's image that was selected, stating the current capture mode. See the Screen Shot help for the detailed instructions of how to set the capture mode or capture an image from the screen.

The "Full Screen" dropdown menu item will set the capture mode to the full screen by changing the "Mode" button's image. Clicking the "Mode" button one more time will capture the image of the full screen (all monitors in one image) or you could use the "Capture Mode" hot key.

The "Object" dropdown menu item will set the capture mode to object by changing the "Mode" button's image. Clicking the "Mode" button one more time will start the capture of an object on the screen. The objects can be windows, controls, the desktop, shortcut menus, etc. When you start the object capture and point the mouse to an object, you will see a red rectangle that is drawn around the object. You can capture the object with in the red rectangle by simply clicking anywhere inside the red rectangle or you could use the "Capture Mode" hot key.

The "Rectangle" dropdown menu item will set the capture mode to the rectangle by changing the "Mode" button's image. Clicking the "Mode" button one more time will place the rectangle and the "Tool Box" forms on the screen.

Screenshot - Rectangle Capture

The last dropdown menu item is for capturing clipboard images. If "Clipboard" menu item is enabled, than by clicking on it will get the clipboard image so that the user can save it into a file. Note that the clipboard should contain an actual image, not a path.

Screenshot - Clipboard Menu

Image Folder

The second button is the "Image Folder" button that opens the Screen Shot image folder in Windows Explorer.

Exit

The third button is the "Exit" button that will exit the application.

Options

The fourth button opens the application’s "Options" window. In here, you can set or create the image folder, whether you want to access the menu instantly by hovering the mouse at the top edge of the screen, specify if the capturing sound should be played when an image is captured, specify if the Screen Shot application should start when the system starts, specify the captured image file settings and properties, and finally, define application hot keys and many more.

Help

The fifth button is the "Help" dropdown button.

Background

The application is written in VB.NET 2005 and uses some API functions to implement the still image captures. All of the capture methods use the application-defined methods to capture the images. For example, if you press the "Print Screen" keyboard key, Windows will capture the desktop image and place it on clipboard by default. However, when using this application it will change this behavior and capture and save the image directly to the image folder. This also means that you will be able to capture transparent windows on the desktop, whereas Windows' default capture doesn't capture transparent windows as transparent.

Since this is an application and it is a big project that uses many of my own components and classes I can't go in to details. This project is an assembly of different classes that I made over a period of time. For example it uses the Shape class to make the menu form's corners rounded; or another one of my components WindowsHookLib that hooks the mouse and the keyboard to help capturing an image. As you can see, the project is huge so I decided to include all the relevant source files in case of need. The most important class that allows capturing the images is ICapture. This class is the base of this application and you can find it in the source files. Almost all the classes are commented so they should be self-explanatory.

System Requirements

Windows NT/2000/XP (tested only on XP)
Framework 2.0
Note: It might not work on XP x64 system.

Screen Shot Information

Author name: Arman Ghazanchyan
Current version 3.1.2.0 (External link to Screen Shot)

History

30^th June, 2007 -- Original version posted
16^th July, 2007 -- Article and downloads updated (version 3.0.3.0)
28^th June, 2008 -- Article and downloads updated (version 3.1.2.0)

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

About the Author

VBDT

Member

Occupation:	Software Developer (Senior)
Location:	United States

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