Multi-touch in WPF 4 – Part 1

During PDC 09, I co-presented a multi-touch session with Robert Levy from Surface.  (BTW, You have got to see the monster demo that Robert gave on the Surface unit.) We made a couple of significant announcements for WPF multi-touch developers.

First, in post beta 2 builds of WPF, we will have built-in touch panning support for standard controls (e.g. Listbox, ListView, DataGrid, TextBox, ScrollViewer, etc.). This means that any WPF4 application will get basic touch support for panning without any additional work from the developer.

Second, Robert announced that Surface will be making the Surface multi-touch controls available to all WPF developers to run on Windows 7. This is really great news for WPF developers. Now you can write fully multi-touch themed and optimized applications using the Surface controls that run anywhere. These will be available as a separate download around the time of Visual Studio 2010 release.

I also presented a deep dive into the WPF 4 multi-touch APIs in a chalk talk at the Web Pavilion.  Unfortunately that session was not recorded. I will share the slides and samples on this blog, and in future posts I will go into more details about each of the samples.