One of the “interesting” things about Silverlight apps running on Windows is that on touch/tablet systems, textboxes in Silverlight do not display a popup button to use for bringing up the Windows onscreen keyboard when they have focus, whereas native applications do. 
The onscreen keyboard is actually present in the Silverlight case – it is usually just “conveniently” tucked against the left side of the screen – and experience has shown me that until you actually show or describe to someone where it is, they will usually not find it on their own. Tap it once, and it “peeks” out a little bit. Tap it again, and it is brought to the center of the screen. Hit the close button, and it returns to its tucked away position on the side of the screen. I have been asked several times for an option to show the onscreen keyboard from within a Silverlight application in a more consistent and user-friendly fashion. It turns out that for Silverlight Out of Browser applications running with Elevated Trust, there is an option – COM Automation can be used to invoke the process that displays the onscreen keyboard, or Text Input Panel (TIP).
Locating the ProcessAs of Windows Vista, the TextInputPanel handles the Tablet Input Panel (TIP). This is implemented in the file TabTip.exe, which exists in the directory <Program Files>\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ink – this is true both in 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows. (Note – I have verified this myself only on Windows 7.) See the following site for more information about the TIP: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms701746(VS.85).aspx. Normally, to locate the needed path, the Environment.GetFolderPath method would be used. However, when called on a 64-bit system from Silverlight with SpecialFolder.CommonProgramFiles as the parameter, it returns the path to the x86 Program Files directory…not the one that is needed in this case. However, using the scripting shell’s ExpandEnvironmentStrings method can get the correct value, as follows: dynamic shell = AutomationFactory.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
String commonPath = shell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%CommonProgramW6432%");
// This path is the same for both 32 and 64-bit installs of Windows
String filePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(commonPath, @"microsoft shared\ink\TabTip.exe");Read more: John Garland's Blog
QR:
Locating the ProcessAs of Windows Vista, the TextInputPanel handles the Tablet Input Panel (TIP). This is implemented in the file TabTip.exe, which exists in the directory <Program Files>\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ink – this is true both in 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows. (Note – I have verified this myself only on Windows 7.) See the following site for more information about the TIP: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms701746(VS.85).aspx. Normally, to locate the needed path, the Environment.GetFolderPath method would be used. However, when called on a 64-bit system from Silverlight with SpecialFolder.CommonProgramFiles as the parameter, it returns the path to the x86 Program Files directory…not the one that is needed in this case. However, using the scripting shell’s ExpandEnvironmentStrings method can get the correct value, as follows: dynamic shell = AutomationFactory.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
String commonPath = shell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%CommonProgramW6432%");
// This path is the same for both 32 and 64-bit installs of Windows
String filePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(commonPath, @"microsoft shared\ink\TabTip.exe");Read more: John Garland's Blog
QR:
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment