How do I prevent print screen

c# .net winforms .net-2.0 c#-2.0
Grady picture Grady · Jan 15, 2009 · Viewed 15.1k times · Source

I have a requirement that an application I am working on prevent the user from being able to easily capture the contents of the screen.

I have communicated that there is no feasible way to completely prevent this from happening, but I'm looking for methods to introduce some hurdles to the process.

I'm using C#/.NET 2.0 and WinForms

Answer

FryGuy picture FryGuy · Jan 15, 2009

You can't.

The best you can do is render to a hardware accelerated device on an overlay, similar to what video players used to do. Basically, you paint your entire window blue, and render your graphics onto the video card, and internally the video card will replace the blue with the graphics. The downside to this is you have to give up using winforms controls, and I don't know of any way to do this with .NET easily. I think if you use DirectShow.NET, one of their samples is putting your own graphics into a stream.

Even after doing all of that, it's still possible to get a screenshot. Just take a picture of the screen with a digital camera.

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