.NET Compact Framework app that will run on both Professional and Standard

Question

Is there any guidance on creating apps that will run on both professional (touch-screen) and standard (non-touch-screen) devices.

I have a simple application that is mostly text and buttons that in theory should be able to run on both professional and standard devices with little if any modification.

It seems the IDE wants to make this hard to impossible, but I expect it to be possible.

Any advice?

Answer 1

Change the project's target platform to "Windows CE" which will turn off all IDE filtering. You'll then have to worry about sizing the Forms, etc. in the designer since they won't have the snazzy device-specific emulator skin. You can then select the proper target device and it will still run normally.

Answer 2

To solve this issue I extended the Form class, in the Form.KeyDown event it passes the EventArgs to all Children implementing IHandleKeypress until one of them consumes it (because KeyDown events always get sent to the active Form, at least on CE 4).

The custom buttons implementing that interface have an AccessKey property to bind device keys to it.