Detect that the onscreen keyboard has been displayed on Windows Phone 7

Question

Simple question: How do I detect that the onscreen keyboard has been displayed on windows mobile 7? Is there an event I can add a listener to?

It takes up about half the screen and I want to scroll the view up when it gets displayed...

EDIT:

A comment below indicates more clearly what I'm trying to do: I have a textbox input, and as the user types into it an autocomplete dropdown appears below it (like google suggest). By default, the active control (the textbox) scrolls into view when focussed, and the onscreen keyboard is directly below it. The onscreen keyboard appears in front of my autocomplete dropdown - what I want to do is make the screen scroll a little further up, so there's some room for my dropdown to be shown.

The windows phone UI design guidelines say: "When the keyboard is deployed, the application should scroll to ensure the active edit control and the caret are in view". This happens fine, it's just the non-active dropdown gets hidden behind the onscreen keyboard.

The guidelines also say that an application can choose to show the onscreen keyboard, and can also choose to close it.

At the moment i'm stuck, and I don't think (based on my research and the replies to this question) that it's possible to detect that the onscreen keyboard has been displayed. I'm moving my investigation to see if it's possible to determine the "visible area" of the page (width & height in pixels for example), and combine this with an onfocus for the textbox... not sure if this will prove fruitful though.

Answer 1

You can listen to the TextBox.GotFocus and TextBox.LostFocus events to detect when a text box in your application acquires and looses focus.

Answer 2

If an editable element gets focus then the framework will automatically scroll the element into view. So you really shouldn't have to do anything.

Answer 3

Detecting when the virtual keyboard is displayed won't be possible in 7.0, as confirmed by Microsoft's Peter Torr in the WP7 forum on MSDN.

Maybe, as a dirty workaround, you could detect when the position of your text box (or its parent scroll viewer's offset) has changed, as this would indicate that the virtual keyboard has appeared or disappeared.