I am integrating a webcam in a WPF application. I can see the camera feed in the main window, as I pass its HANDLE on to the DirectShow functions. But this is not what I want.
The main form has a Image control, where I'd like to see the output. However, in order to do this, I need the control's Handle.
Any hint on how to do this?
Thanks in advance,
Gianluca.
An Image Control in WPF, unlike Windows Forms, doesn't actually have an HWND.
WPF works differently than Windows Forms - each control is not a wrapper around a native "window" with a handle, but rather composed together using Direct3D at runtime by the layout system.
If you need to actually host output from a Webcam inside of a WPF window, you should look at using HwndHost (or a subclass). The simplest way is often to just host a Windows Forms control inside of a WindowsFormsHost, though managing an HWND yourself via HwndHost is more efficient.
Using an WindowsFormsHost and a picture box inside is a good solution that I used for a similar problem where I needed a handle to display a video stream. But be careful, in order to work, the Window that is hosting the WindowsFormsHost control must have AllowsTransparency="false"!
Related
WPF and Windows Forms Interoperation
Description on MSDN:
In a WPF user interface, you can change the z-order of elements to control overlapping behavior. A hosted Windows Forms control is drawn in a separate HWND, so it is always drawn on top of WPF elements.
*But I would like to know there is no private way to solve it?
No, this is known as the airspace problem (because WinForms elements take all of it).
There was supposed to be a fix around .NET 4.5/4.6 but it never made it to production (source; there are others if you google it). There has been no word as of yet that Microsoft plans on addressing it.
This article might help with ways to get around it: MSDN
My first recommandation would be to replace the Windows Form control by an equivalent WPF control.
Second recommandation would be to accept the limitation and do not overlap any WPF control over the Windows Form control.
In some case, you might be able to use multiple top-level Windows to work around the limitation. You then have to write some code to properly synchronize the location or the apparent activation state of Windows...
I have never done that between Windows Form and WPF but I have done 2 top-level windows in Windows Form so that part of the UI could be semi-transparent (the purpose was to be able to overlap another application (maybe a PDF viewer) so that we can "copy" curves from existing charts).
I did a search online but they are talking about how to do this for WPF.
Imagine a win32 application like shown below, and assume the app itself allows creating new Windows Forms windows as child windows. So they can talk to each other, I can send keypresses, and control the parent application.
What I want to do is to strip that listview outlined in the image and host it on my Winforms window. So it's hosted inside my Winforms window floating on top, and moves the control as my Winforms window moves.
I can get the hWnd handle from the parent app's .NET API but I am not sure if what I want is possible. If so, how?
Apart from the different-application angle, you can host a Win32 window inside of WinForms with the NativeWindow class.
If you use the SetParent function, then it works just as you expect:
http://www.pinvoke.net/default.aspx/user32.setparent
You might have to move the control to an appropriate location in your Winforms window and possibly resize it too, using the MoveWindow function:
http://www.pinvoke.net/default.aspx/user32.movewindow
I've created an WPF based application showing me thumbnails of external windows. As an example i pick up icq, firefox and some other windows, create thumbnails of these and render them onto my WPF based application.
That works fine already and looks like this:
http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/1170/oijoijio.jpg
(Just showing one thumbnail in here, but there will be multiple in future)
The WPF application will also contain some controls to actually select the windows being "thumbnailed" and a few others.
The next step and my actual question is about how i would redirect these content being rendered into a Bitmap instead of the "WPF window" itself.
Is there a way to accomblish that goal? All the windows content (WPF containers and the drawn thumbnails) need to be rendered into a bitmap which i can display in directx window being owned by a game.
I know that it is possible todo that somehow, as a programm called overwolf also uses WPF inside of their application. They actually install device inline detours to hook into the rendering process of the game, where they render their wpf content. I am not sure if they use some kind of bitmap they render in there, or if they directly render the wpf content onto the dx-surface somehow.
Other ideas besides the bitmap based style i plan to go for are welcome aswell!
Thanks for your reading until here, and another big hug for any answer :)
Any WPF Visual object can be rendered into a bitmap using RenderTargetBitmap.
Is there a way to obtain a bitmap rendering of a Windows Forms control, specifically a WebBrowser, upon creating an instance, but not adding it to a visible form? A mechanism like WPF's measure & arrange that would allow me to render it to a bitmap.
I'm targetting .NET 4.0 and looking for a way to capture the WebBrowser control's contents without ever displaying it.
See this question: WebBrowser.DrawToBitmap() or other methods?
I'm working on an application, and I have a screen that in my mind, looks a lot like the Wireless Network List in Windows Vista. For those who are unaware, its basically a listview, but in each row, instead of a line of text, there's a large 'panel' that contains all sorts of useful information. Does anyone know if that's an actual UI control available on windows, or should I roll my own with some sort of autosizing table layout panel hosting a collection of custom controls?
I know this is pretty easy to make using WPF using the stackpanel layout along with a series of user controls containing grid controls for internal layout. Or are you using windows forms?
The wireless network dialog isn't using a standard Win32 control, it's using a custom control (effectively).
If you want to emulate that behavior, you're going to have to use WPF or roll your own.
Not an exact answer but you may want to look at the various Vista TaskDialog libraries and dialogs that have been based on that. You may be able to borrow some of the code since they share some UI functionality. I need to do the something similar with WPF.