My understanding of Vista is that each window gets it's own screen buffer which is then alpha blended etc to create the screen.
So, is there any way to screen capture a window which is obscured or partly off screen by directly reading these buffers? Vista does it when you alt-tab or hover the mouse over the taskbar.
I'm doing this in Delphi, but code in any language will suffice.
Best Answer
I believe those buffers don't exists when those windows are off-screen. Or only partially exist when partially off-screen.
If you pay attention to the window thumbnails, you will find it will not update when those windows are minimized or off-screen. WM_PAINT will fire as a window is being dragged from off-screen to on, again suggesting that this data was not already buffered somewhere.