Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Does using the Windows 8.x touch/onscreen keyboard in your WPF desktop sound cool to you?

Brian Lagunas - Showing the Windows 8 Touch keyboard in WPF

With the release of Windows 8, the era of touch devices is in full swing.  Manufacturers are scrambling to create mobile devices that can run Microsoft Windows with the touch of a finger, without the need for a keyboard and mouse.  Even Microsoft has released their very own Surface brand to satisfy this need to run Windows in a mobile world.  This is all fine and dandy if you are building Windows Store applications that run on any version of Windows 8, and are built with touch as a first class citizen.  Windows Store apps integrate perfectly with the device, such as automatically showing the Windows 8 touch keyboard when giving focus to an input element in the application.  Windows Store apps are smart enough to know when I am not using a mouse and keyboard, and I give focus to a TextBox by touching it, it will show the touch keyboard to allow me to input data.  On the other hand, if I am using a mouse and keyboard, and I give focus to the TextBox by clicking it with the mouse, the touch keyboard does not show, but rather I use the keyboard to enter my data.  This is a nice feature built into the platform.

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This is a pretty cool way to leverage what you've got. If you're already running on Windows 8.x, you might as well use as much of it as you can, right? Brian's post does just that...

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