How to render a WPF UserControl to a bitmap without creating a window

Question

How can I render a WPF UserControl to a bitmap without creating a window? I need to render a WPF UserControl and upload it to another program. The bitmaps will be rendered t

Answer 1

Have you tried spinning up an instance of the user control and doing something like this:

UserControl control = new UserControl1();

control.Measure(new Size(300, 300));
control.Arrange(new Rect(new Size(300,300)));

RenderTargetBitmap bmp = new RenderTargetBitmap(300, 300, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Pbgra32);

bmp.Render(control);

var encoder = new PngBitmapEncoder();

encoder.Frames.Add(BitmapFrame.Create(bmp));

using (Stream stm = File.Create(@"c:\test.png"))
   encoder.Save(stm);

It looks like you need to Measure, Arrange. This worked for me.