How to get a screen capture of a .Net WinForms control programmatically?

Question

There's a method on every control called DrawToBitmap. You don't need to p/invoke to do this.

Control c = new TextBox();
System.Drawing.Bitmap bmp = new System.Drawing.Bitmap(c.Width, c.Height);
c.DrawToBitmap(bmp, c.ClientRectangle);

You can get a picture of a .NET control programmatically pretty easily using the DrawToBitmap method of the Control class starting in .NET 2.0

Here is a sample in VB

    Dim formImage As New Bitmap("C:\File.bmp")
    Me.DrawToBitmap(formImage, Me.Bounds)

And here it is in C#:

 Bitmap formImage = New Bitmap("C:\File.bmp")
 this.DrawToBitmap(formImage, this.Bounds)

Control.DrawToBitmap will let you draw most controls to a bitmap. This does not work with RichTextBox and some others.

If you want to capture these, or a control that has one of them, then you need to do PInvoke like described in this CodeProject article: Image Capture

Take care that some of these methods will capture whatever is on the screen, so if you have another window covering your control you will get that instead.

For WinForms controls that support it, there is a method in the System.Windows.Forms.Control class:

public void DrawToBitmap(Bitmap bitmap, Rectangle targetBounds);

This does not work with all controls, however. Third party component vendors have more comprehensive solutions.