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After working with many customer issues where I needed good screenshots I decided to write a screen or window capture tool to make troubleshooting and reading other logs/traces easier. Here is ScreenHistory tool with familiar History-like GUI interface if you have seen WindowHistory, MessageHistory and ProcessHistory tools.

The tool captures the whole screen (currently the primary monitor) after specified interval (default is 1 second) or the contents of a current foreground window (multi-monitor independent) and saves its screenshot in JPEG, GIF (default) or PNG file. Additionally an HTML file is generated with links to screenshots. New forthcoming versions of WindowHistory and MessageHistory will reference these screenshots. Windows Mobile version will be released soon too.

Instead of forming a mental picture about screen when you look at messages or relating them to arbitrary screenshots sent by your customers you can easily check real-time screenshots when you look at message traces, for example, MessageHistory trace:

13:12:24:944 S WM_ACTIVATEAPP (0x1c) wParam: 0x0 lParam: 0x12ec Deactivated / TID of activated window: 0x12ec
…
[Screen]
13:12:47:268 S WM_ACTIVATEAPP (0×1c) wParam: 0×1 lParam: 0×0 Activated / TID of deactivated window: 0×0
…
[Screen]

or WindowHistory trace

Handle: 000300E4 Class: "MyClass" Title: "My Application"
   Captured at: 13:11:47:983
   Process ID: 6c4
   Thread ID: 1054
   Parent: 0
   Screen position (l,t,r,b): (264,161,1032,691)
   Visible: true
   Window placement command: SW_SHOWNORMAL
   Foreground: false
        Foreground changed at 13:12:20:626 to true
   [Screen]
        Foreground changed at 13:12:24:959 to false
   [Screen]
        Foreground changed at 13:12:47:284 to true
   [Screen]
        Foreground changed at 13:12:51:852 to false
   [Screen]

The following ScreenHistory screenshot was saved by the tool itself:

If you save an HTML file and load it in IE you would see formatted screen log (screenshot was saved by ScreenHistory):

You can download ScreenHistory from Citrix support web site. Any feedback about tools is greatly appreciated.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

           

Announcements

Coming Soon:

Debugging Notebook: Essential Concepts, WinDbg Commands and Tools

Crash Dump Analysis for System Administrators and Support Engineers

New Magazines:

Debugged! MZ/PE: MagaZine for/from Practicing Engineers

New Books:

Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 3

First Fault Software Problem Solving: A Guide for Engineers, Managers and Users

x64 Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations

Also available:

Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations

DLL List Landscape: The Art from Computer Memory Space

Dumps, Bugs and Debugging Forensics: The Adventures of Dr. Debugalov

WinDbg: A Reference Poster and Learning Cards

Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 2

Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 1

New Children's Book:

Baby Turing

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Announcements, Citrix, Debugging, Software Technical Support, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.