Extracting keyboard layouts from windows

Question

OK, this is a slightly weird question.

We have a touch-screen application (i.e., no keyboard). When users need to enter text, the application shows virtual keyboard - hand-built in WinForms.

Making these things by hand for each new language is monkey work. I figure that windows must have this keyboard layout information hiding somewhere in some dll. Would there be anyway to get this information out of windows?

Other ideas welcome (I figure at least generating the thing from a xml file has got to be better than doing it by hand in VS).

(Note: having said all which, I note that there is a Japanese keyboard, state machine and all..., so XML might not be sufficient)

UPDATE: pretty good series on this subject (I believe) here

Answer 1

Please check following Windows API

 [DllImport("user32.dll")]
 private static extern long LoadKeyboardLayout(string pwszKLID, uint Flags);

Check MSDN here

Answer 2

Why don't you use the on-screen keyboard (osk.exe)? Looks like you re-inventing the wheel. And not the easiest one!

Answer 3

Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator can load system keyboards and export them as .klc files. Since it’s written in .NET you can use Reflector to see how it does that, and use reflection to drive it.

I’ve already done this once before, so here’s a tarball of all the .klc files for Windows XP. If you need the new layouts in Vista, re-run the code included in the tarball. It’s written in Mathematica but should be straightforward to translate to any other .NET-compatible language.