How to effectively draw on desktop in C#?

Posted by Lazlo on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Lazlo
Published on 2010-05-25T14:50:29Z Indexed on 2010/05/25 15:01 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 295

Filed under:

c#

|

drawing

|

gdi

|

buffer

|

onpaint

I want to draw directly on the desktop in C#. From searching a bit, I ended up using a Graphics object from the Desktop HDC (null). Then, I painted normally using this Graphics object.

The problem is that my shapes get lost when any part of the screen is redrawn. I tried a While loop, but it actually ends up drawing as fast as the application can, which is not the update rate of the desktop.

Normally, I would need to put my drawing code in a "OnPaint" event, but such thing does not exist for the desktop.

How would I do it?

Example code: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1536141/how-to-draw-directly-on-the-windows-desktop-c

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about drawing

Designer issue in VS: Events cannot be set on the object passed to the event binding service ...

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have a little problem: the Winform control (that contains between others WPF) suddenly stopped to be displayed in Designer. Message: Events cannot be set on the object passed to the event binding service because a site associated with the object could not be located. Call Stack: … >>> More
Drawing continuously in drawing application

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I was wondering how drawing applications draw the entire time the mouse is down without having empty gaps. What I mean is, for example if the program only drew circles at the mouse's X, y coordinate, then if the mouse went too quicly it would seem like a bunch of little circles rather than a nice… >>> More
Project compile perfectly but i get unhandled exception and have no idea why??? any clues?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
get unhandled exception that says: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Eagle_Eye_Class_Finder.GetSchedule.GetDataFromNumber(String ID) in C:\Users\Joshua Banks\Desktop\EET Project\Eagle Eye Class Finder\GetSchedule.cs:line 24 at Eagle_Eye_Class_Finder… >>> More
Have a program/winform that outputs name and classes in message box, my objective is to write the cl

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Here is my Get Schedule Class: using System; using System.IO; using System.Data; using System.Text; using System.Drawing; using System.Data.OleDb; using System.Collections; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Drawing.Printing; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace… >>> More
drawing hierarchical tree with orthogonal lines ( HV-Drawing – Binary Tree)

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi I need to work on drawing a hierarchical tree structure (HV-Drawing – Binary Tree) with orthogonal lines(straight rectangular connecting lines) between root and children ( like the following: http://lab.kapit.fr/display/visualizationlayouts/Hierarchical+Tree+layout ). I want to know if there are… >>> More