WPF supports touch or multi-touch screen?

Question

Hello everyone,

I am wondering whether WPF on .Net 3.5 supports touch or multi-touch for laptop? Appreciate if there are some cool Demos to show the effect.

I am using VSTS2008 + C#.

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

Not natively, but check out the Windows 7 Code Pack, which brings 7-based features to .NET developers. This is code from MS, btw, not a 3rd party library.

It includes multitouch code, but I don't know exactly how easy it is to use in a WPF application.

Relevant links:
http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2009/08/07/windows-7-code-pack-v-1-0-released.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1c333f06-fadb-4d93-9c80-402621c600e7

Answer 2

It's not really WPF's responsibility to support touch-devices, but the O/S. The O/S simply delegates the events of mouseDown == fingerTouchedScreen to WPF (not a 100% accurate statement, but good enough :) ).

If you want to develop WPF for touchscreen-devices, you really need to look at your UI design instead of what's supported and what's not.

This post has a nice answer for that.

Basically, you work with the same events as you'd do with your standard smith'n'wesson point'n'click devices :)

Answer 3

There's some great sample code in the "Windows 7 Training Kit For Developers". Sure you'll need Windows 7, but it's totally worth it! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1c333f06-fadb-4d93-9c80-402621c600e7

Answer 4

WPF 4.0 Beta 2 supports full multi-touch, but only on Windows 7, as Windows 7 is the first multi-touch enabled Windows version.

For 3.5 on XP you can try out the Breeze for WPF 3.5 multi-touch framework at http://code.google.com/p/breezemultitouch/ its open source and plugs into TUIO (multi-touch protocol). TUIO allows you to bridge between various multi-touch devices and your WPF 3.5 application without the need for operating system multi-touch support.