Pop-up Thumbnails of Linked Pages

Question

I would like to show thumbnails of external websites that I link to when the user mouses over the links, similar to how snap.com does this. How can I accomplish the same thing?

Answer 1

Try System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser. Like this:

void GetWebImage()
{
    WebBrowser browser = new WebBrowser();
    browser.Size = new Size(200, 150);
    browser.ScrollBarsEnabled = false;

    browser.Navigate("http://www.stackoverflow.com");

    while (browser.ReadyState != WebBrowserReadyState.Complete)
    {
       // release temporary e.g. some threading resources ...
    }

    Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(200, 150);
    browser.DrawToBitmap(bitmap, new Rectangle(browser.Location.X, browser.Location.Y, browser.Width, browser.Height));
}

and run it in STA thread:

Thread threas = new Thread(new ThreadStart(GetWebImage));
threas.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
threas.Start();

then you can save the Bitmap to filesystem or you can use that code in Http Handler and with easy javascript code shows it after some mouse event..