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I was asked to develop a software in vb.net and one of it's features should be the possibility to take photos on a tablet PC. I already played around with the MediaCapture API which returns me a photo, but as it seems that it's not possible to show a preview or anything else outside of ModernUI apps. It's just pure photo capturing.

I thought for a little while how this problem could be solved. I got some inspiration from my Android phone then. My idea was to call some sort of API to open up the regular Windows 8 camera app in ModernUI mode, let the user take the photo and then receiving that through a "return value", just like you usually do it in Android apps.

Now my question is, if there is a way to start up the Windows 8 default camera app, let it take a photo and receive that back into my WPF desktop application.

I could develop my software as ModernUI app as well, but I never did that and it also seems like you must publish it over the web store then, but I only want to use that inside my company.

My other (simple stupid) idea would be to ask the user to open the camera app by himself, take some photos and come back to my software later. I could then receive the images from the folder they were stored in. I guess that would work as well, but I don't really like that idea because it's not very intuitive and seems just stupid.

If you have an idea (or an alternative), I would be really happy if you could share it with me.

Thanks in advance!

André R.
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Unfortunately, there are no .NET classes that allow you to access a webcam or integrated camera on your computer. This means that you have to take a look at the native Windows API and call it from your application. I cannot point you to the right methods that you have to use, as I just have used Microsoft Media Foundation to capture a continuous stream of images from a webcam and encode it to a video file.

There are some sites that encapsulate this native functionality in .NET classes, but I don't know if they are good or not:

In Windows Store Apps, this task can be performed relatively easy with the media capture API you've mentioned. You can also side-load Windows Store Apps if you have Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise - then you do not have to publish your app in the Windows Store.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.

feO2x
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  • Thank you very much! Unfortunately this isn't quite what I expected. Seems to be pretty complicated for such a simple thing. Is there at least a way to launch the default camera app from my WPF program? – André R. Aug 27 '14 at 13:54
  • Have a look at this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22475520/start-metro-app-camera-from-wpf-application – feO2x Aug 27 '14 at 13:59