capturing an off screen area

[joseph.inglis]

Heres an interesting one and i guess its idea that are needed as opposed to
a direct solution (although one would be welcomed of course).

I want to render a webpage as an image. At the moment this is done using
awebbrowser object and use of BitBlt to capture the screen... Ive done it a
few ways, in both vb and c# and it works well (hurrah).

But this is only useful if the form hosting the webbrowser object is
visible. How can one do this without actually displaying anything on any
screen?

Am open to suggestions... perhaps saving the entire webpage as a file and
converting that way is possible, or perhaps a clever way of drawing to an
offscreen area and capturing from there?

Ultimately this will be a 'silent' service that will accept a url and reply
back with a byte stream of an image representing that page. Im happy about
all of that... just stuck on this issue... any assistance or pointers would
be 'most good'

Tam