Screen capture in Haskell?

Question

Is it possible to capture the screen (or a window) using Haskell in a Windows environment? (ie, taking a screenshot every few minutes or so). If so, how would one go about d

Answer 1

You should be able to do this with the Win32 API. Based on What is the best way to take screenshots of a Window with C++ in Windows?, you need to get the context of the window and then copy the image from it using GetWindowDC and BitBlt respectively.

Looking around the Haskell Win32 API documentation, there is a getWindowDC function in Graphics.Win32.Window. This returns an IO HDC. There is a bitblt function in Graphics.Win32.GDI.Graphics2D. This function takes an HDC along with a bunch of INTs which presumably correspond to the arguments it takes in C++.

Unfortunately, I don't have a Windows machine handy, so I can't write the actual code. You'll have to figure out how to use the Win32 API functions yourself, which might be a bit of a bother.

When you do, it would be great if you factored it into a library and put it up on Hackage--Windows does not usually get much love in Haskell land (as I myself show :P), so I'm sure other Windows programmers would be grateful for an easy way to take screenshots.