Snapshot of an WPF Canvas Area using RenderTargetBitmap

Question

I want to create a Snapshot of the Canvas Area in my Application. I'm using Visual brush to get the Snapshot and saving the same using PngEncoder. But the resulting PNG is just a empty black image. I'm not sure the issue is with the BitmapSource created or the PNGEncoder issue. Here is the code I'm using to obtain the same.

public void ConvertToBitmapSource(UIElement element)
{
    var target = new RenderTargetBitmap((int)(element.RenderSize.Width), (int)(element.RenderSize.Height), 96, 96, PixelFormats.Pbgra32);
    var brush = new VisualBrush(element);

    var visual = new DrawingVisual();
    var drawingContext = visual.RenderOpen();


    drawingContext.DrawRectangle(brush, null, new Rect(new Point(0, 0),
    new Point(element.RenderSize.Width, element.RenderSize.Height)));

    drawingContext.Close();

    target.Render(visual);

    PngBitmapEncoder encoder = new PngBitmapEncoder();
    BitmapFrame outputFrame = BitmapFrame.Create(target);
    encoder.Frames.Add(outputFrame);
    using (FileStream file = File.OpenWrite("TestImage.png"))
    {
         encoder.Save(file);
    }

}   

Answer 1

Not sure why exactly your code isn't working. This works:

public void WriteToPng(UIElement element, string filename)
{
    var rect = new Rect(element.RenderSize);
    var visual = new DrawingVisual();

    using (var dc = visual.RenderOpen())
    {
        dc.DrawRectangle(new VisualBrush(element), null, rect);
    }

    var bitmap = new RenderTargetBitmap(
        (int)rect.Width, (int)rect.Height, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Default);
    bitmap.Render(visual);

    var encoder = new PngBitmapEncoder();
    encoder.Frames.Add(BitmapFrame.Create(bitmap));

    using (var file = File.OpenWrite(filename))
    {
        encoder.Save(file);
    }
}