You can do it not over LAN but even of Internet if you want. With the LAN you can do it faster if firewalls can block binary protocols. So, the key is: you need to create a network Windows Service which can take a screen shot of its local computer on the request by network and send the result to the client.
First, how to make a screenshot? Here is a simple code sample:
http://www.dotnetjalps.com/2007/06/how-to-take-screenshot-in-c.html[
^]. You may want to make this code more robust to support multiple monitors.
Now, a network communication can be done on different levels; I provided overview of them in my past solutions:
how i can send byte[] to other pc[
^],
Communication b/w two Windows applications on LAN.[
^].
Important part of such Service should be multithreading. You can find some basic ideas in my other past solutions:
Multple clients from same port Number[
^],
automatic updater triggered via server[
^].
A client part could be a regular Windows Application, based on Forms or WPF.
There is one more interesting option: a Service can implement a custom HTTP service. In this case, your client could be a regular available Web browser. Alternatively, you can install IIS on each computer and write an ASP.NET application. Start with
http://ASP.NET[
^]. One more light-weight option using ASP.NET would be using Apache, Mono with mod_mono, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_%28software%29[
^],
http://www.mono-project.com/[
^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_mono[
^],
http://www.mono-project.com/Mod_mono[
^].
With the approach using of HTTP Server, the client uses a Web browser, enter URL of a computer and gets an HTML page form the service. This page has a form with the button "Take a screenshot". A press on this button sends HTTP request to the service computer and receives a current screen shot of it generated on the server side, for downloading or on-screen viewing.
—SA
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