How to determine pixel's color (help GREATLY appreciated)?

[bulldog]

I'm working on a program right now where I have the need to make a function that when feed the x,y coords of a certain pixel on the screen spits out the RGB number of that pixel. The pixels will lie outside the program so I can't use functions attached to my Form's controls (i.e. find out the pixel is part of a button and use btnStart.get_BackColor()).

 

I'm using J# .NET, and can't really find anything on MSDN or online that deals with this sort of problem (maybe I'm no good at researching). I thought of using a colorpicker dialog, similar to the eyedropper on Photoshop, but can't find one (didn't they have one in Visual J++?), or even PrintScreen and enumerating through the pixels until I get to the one I want, but can't figure out a way to do a screen capture (SendKeys.Send("{PRTSC}") is not yet implemented). As you can tell I don't need an elegant solution, I'm a hardcore hacker at heart. Thanks in advance, this would really help me out a lot.

[ThePentiumGuy]

Crap. J# doesn't let you do SendKeys? I was going to suggest you do this:

 

Public Function GetScreenCapture(Optional ByVal FullScreen As Boolean = False) As Image

' Captures the current screen and returns as an Image

' object

Dim objSK As SendKeys

Dim imgCapture As Image

If FullScreen = True Then

' Print Screen pressed twice here as some systems

' grab active window "accidentally" on first run

objSK.SendWait("{PRTSC 2}")

Else

objSK.SendWait("%{PRTSC}")

End If

Dim objData As IDataObject = Clipboard.GetDataObject()

Return CType(objData.GetData(DataFormats.Bitmap), Bitmap)

End Function

 

Try SendWait then ;). Sorry I can't help you there.

 

-The Pentium Guy

[bulldog]

Crap. J# doesn't let you do SendKeys? I was going to suggest you do this:

 

Public Function GetScreenCapture(Optional ByVal FullScreen As Boolean = False) As Image

' Captures the current screen and returns as an Image

' object

Dim objSK As SendKeys

Dim imgCapture As Image

If FullScreen = True Then

' Print Screen pressed twice here as some systems

' grab active window "accidentally" on first run

objSK.SendWait("{PRTSC 2}")

Else

objSK.SendWait("%{PRTSC}")

End If

Dim objData As IDataObject = Clipboard.GetDataObject()

Return CType(objData.GetData(DataFormats.Bitmap), Bitmap)

End Function

 

Try SendWait then ;). Sorry I can't help you there.

 

-The Pentium Guy

 

hehe..... umm I feel dumb for saying this, but you were right. In the MSDN documentation it says that the {PRTSC} argument of SendKeys.Send() is reserved for future use, but I went ahead and tried it anyways.... low and behold it works. Thanks for the advice.

[ThePentiumGuy]

No problem. It looks like Microsoft needs to update their documentation :).