Capturing WPF Vector Information BEFORE it Renders to Screen

Question

I'm trying to "capture" or record the vector display information of a WPF (maybe Silverlight) application and play it back.

However, instead of capturing bitmaps of what is rendered, I would like to capture the vector information BEFORE it gets rendered so that I can play it back at different resolutions without loss of quality.

Ideally, I'd like to do this without having to add assemblies into my app (but willing to do so if necessary).

I've looked into the WPF rendering pipeline and cannot find an appropriate starting point (or, stated differently, I couldn't figure it out). Maybe the VisualTreeHelper class?

Answer 1

It sounds like you want the CompositionTarget.Rendering static event.
This event fires right before a frame is rendered out to the screen and should give you access to the visual tree before it was rendered.