How do I get a screenshot of a given website using C#

Posted by Ender on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ender
Published on 2009-12-30T18:25:53Z Indexed on 2010/03/22 20:01 UTC
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I'm writing a specialised crawler and parser for internal use and I require the ability to take a screenshot of a web page in order to check what colours are being used throughout. The program will take in around ten web addresses and will save them as a bitmap image, from there I plan to use LockBits in order to create a list of the five most used colours within the image. To my knowledge it's the easiest way to get the colours used within a web page but if there is an easier way to do it please chime in with your suggestions.

Anyway, I was going to use this program until I saw the price tag. I'm also fairly new to C#, having only used it for a few months. Can anyone provide me with a solution to my problem of taking a screenshot of a web page in order to extract the colour scheme?

EDIT: Sorry for not getting back to this sooner, but I've been busy with some other things. Anyway, the code seems to work well, but the problem I am having right now is that I am running it within a form, and naturally with Application.Run() being called I cannot run two instances of the same form at once. It recommended Form.showDialog() but that broke everything. Can anyone give me a hand with this code?

public static void buildScreenshotFromURL(string url) {

    int width = 800;
    int height = 600;

    using (WebBrowser browser = new WebBrowser()) {
        browser.Width = width;
        browser.Height = height;
        browser.ScrollBarsEnabled = true;

        // This will be called when the page finishes loading
        browser.DocumentCompleted += new System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventHandler(OnDocumentCompleted);
        //browser.DocumentCompleted += OnDocumentCompleted;

        browser.Navigate(url);

        // This prevents the application from exiting until
        // Application.Exit is called

        // Application.Run() does not work as it cannot be called twice, recommended form.showDialog()
        // but still issues
        Application.Run();
    }
}

public static void OnDocumentCompleted(object sender, WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e) {
    // Define size of thumbnail neded
    int thumbSize = 50;

    // Now that the page is loaded, save it to a bitmap
    WebBrowser browser = (WebBrowser)sender;

    using (Graphics graphics = browser.CreateGraphics()) {
        using (Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(browser.Width, browser.Height, graphics)) {
            Rectangle bounds = new Rectangle(0, 0, bitmap.Width, bitmap.Height);
            browser.DrawToBitmap(bitmap, bounds);
            Bitmap thumbBitmap = new Bitmap(bitmap.GetThumbnailImage(thumbSize, thumbSize, thumbCall, IntPtr.Zero));
            thumbBitmap.Save("screenshot.png", ImageFormat.Png);
            handleImage(thumbBitmap);
        }
    }

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