I am making a WPF application that is to be used on a kiosk with no hardware keyboard. Currently we are using a third party on-screen keyboard, but the Windows 8 version is a lot better and we are thinking of switching to it.
So my question is simply if it is possible to show/hide it as well as show a numeric only version using c#.
Thanks!
David
From this source:
There is no direct way to control the touch keyboard programmatically.
Requiring the user to set the focus rather than the program is a
deliberate design decision to prevent UI churn.
See Input Hosting Manager and the Touch Keyboard for more information
on how and why this works. The User-driven invocation section of that
document explains the specific behavior you are asking about.
But, once the user touches an input control, the soft keyboard will automatically be displayed (with no extra coding needed).
Finally, to address your question on a numeric-only version of a keyboard, you may propose a different keyboard layout using InputScope on a TextBox. The different input scopes are enumerated here, but one of them is "Number".
I've published a sample on how to trigger the touch keyboard in WPF applications when a user clicks into a Textbox, its here:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Enabling-Windows-8-Touch-7fb4e6de
I've been working on this sample for many months and am glad to finally contribute it to our community. Please let me know if there are any questions, suggestions, problems, etc in the sample Q&A pane
Also note that while demonstrate how to "show" the keyboard, i'm not sure how to dismiss it programmatically at this point so its important to test any actual implementation to ensure its a good experience. For example some controls like Button will dismiss the keyboard when they get focus from a TextBox, but certain ones like Checkbox will not and I demonstrate that in my sample.
Related
My goal is to show Windows 10 on-screen keyboard when user clicks on text box.
Windows 10 has option to show its on-screen keyboard automatically, even outside of Tablet mode, if specific option is enabled in settings.
However, it seems this logic has some serious issues when working with WPF applications - flickering, not showing up at all etc. You can easily test it on simple WPF application with several text boxes, if you have touch screen Win10 device.
So, I've decided to control keyboard myself, which now works perfectly, with automatic keyboard display option disabled. However, I can't ensure that every users Windows 10 will have this option disabled, so I'd like to make Windows "ignore" clicks on text boxes in my WPF application, so only application itself controls keyboard visibility.
So, my question is - is there any way to make Windows ignore focus on particular text boxes?
PS. If there is no clear way to do this, I would be grateful for any hints towards how Windows actually gets information about WPF text box being edited, so I can maybe play around with my own TextBox implementations, which will not trigger this logic.
Update:
It seems, it is possible to remove "hooks" keyboard is using to find out that text box is focused, by using FrameworkElementAutomationPeer instead of TextBoxAutomationPeer in custom implementation of TextBox, yet this ruins possibility to use this text box in automation (which I don't like).
I don't have a touch screen device to test on - but from my quick mouse clicking tests I seen there is a TextBox.Focusable = false;
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.uielement.focusable(v=vs.110).aspx
This how ever makes it unable to get keyboard input, so maybe put another method on a TextBox like:
txtBoxTestFocus_MouseDown or txtBoxTestFocus_TouchDown which then could set txtBoxTestFocus.Focusable = true;
Not sure is this will help, as I've been unable to test it sorry
I am working on a WPF-MVVM (.Net 4.0) application that has a Metro look (it just has a look, it is not a metro application.)
I need to show a windows 8 like message box that blocks the operations for the user before he rids that message box by clicking yes/no/cancel (or any button.).
I came across this otherwise great article and momentarily thought that I have found the solution. But this has its own drawback.It just stops the user from interacting with the controls behind by mouse clicks. The user can however use the tab key to get back to the buttons behind and click them (pressing enter).
A number of things are coming to my mind:
should I go for custom adorners and play with hitTestable property?
Or should I place a control and play with its visible property.
Before going for any approach I thought of putting forward my question to the wonderful community here if someone has done a similar thing in past and provide me some pointer/reference/approach.
Can someone suggest what is the way to achieve this? Please note I will be happy to use prism or any other open source if that solves the purpose but the window will have to be custom made.
Please excuse me if you find this too stupid a question. Please pardon my ignorance. Thanks for reading this.
I recently came across a similar problem, I resolved it using a DialogPresenter as explained there:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/36516/WPF-Modal-Dialog
I had to do a few tweaks there and there but overall it's working fine and I now have a nice way to display dialog boxes!
There is a better way of doing it
var dialog = new MessageDialog("Select Social network is already authorised!");
dialog.ShowAsync();
A WinForms program will inevitably send notification to user. There are two types of notifications:
Important: user needs to take action on it
Non-Important: kind of like "there is something going on, and you might want to pay attention".
It's pretty common that MessageBox is used for both of the two types. But recently I found MessageBox is kind of annoying: it steals user's focus and user has to click to dismiss it. I want to know what's the alternatives for MessageBox and their pros/cons?
To start, here is some idea:
Statusbar: not easy to display lengthy notification
taskbar notification: does people think it's evil since most internet ads popup use that approach?
floating statusbar: Chrome/IE9/Evernote use similar floating statusbar, which is hidden when there is no link address or no message.
Chrome UI: Infobar and Status Bubble
IE9: Notification bar
We implemented a mechanism similar to taskbar notification, but placed in some coordinates inside a WinForms control.
This has some advantages:
You have some context about where (location) the notification is shown and why.
It is non modal, so it not blocks the GUI.
It's easy to implement using a owned form without border.
You can place it wherever you want.
You can show a link label with a short explanation and show help, other dialos, or link some actions if the user needs further explanation. The user experience is improved.
But I recommend using notifications only for informative messages.
You must take into account some tips about the messagebox:
It's the standard way to show information to the user.
It should be user to notify an error message or a warning. The messagebox ensures that the user, at least, clicked ok. So the user is aware that something happens. Yes, maybe he didn't read the message, but at lease he saw an error or warning.
It is possible that the user ignores other reporting mechanisms.
Hope it helps.
I have been working on a C# WinForms solution using the WebBrowser control on a form.
At this time it has three modes: Prompt; Countdown Prompt; Countdown Timer and Combo(box) prompt.
Using the webbrowser control allows HTML to be used which gives you free selection of Fonts; Colors and sizes.
I'd share what I have if I only knew how to share a solution instead of a code snippet.
What I've got works and has two parts, the designer and the prompt itself.
If an admin will contact me I can provide a download link and they can review to see what they think.
I'm writing an application that is supposed to show and hide the content of the main window stack panel based on the user choice. For example, the user clicks on the button that displays the list of the customers, then click on the button that displays the ordering form. The customers content should be hidden and the ordering form should be visible. Moreover, if there are contents with related information (like customers and their data) I want to be able to change the data in one window and it should automatically refresh the data in the other window when the user decides to open it. Is there a good way to do it in MVVM?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Because this question is so generic, the answer must be as well, and the answer is that this is exactly what MVVM is for - modeling data and binding it as needed. In fact, I would argue that a majority of MVVM examples you find online will be some flavor of an answer to your question, most likely using good ol' Northwind.
It sounds like you need to really take a good look at how you want to do your design before you jump in and start coding.
You might want to check out Prism (or as it is really named Composite Application Guidance). You can build really complex and modular designs with it.
You might be interested in the MVVM sample applications of the WPF Application Framework (WAF).
Writer: Shows how the Views (UserControls) can be switched (Edit mode; Print Preview mode).
BookLibrary: Shows how data modified in one View is automatically updated in other Views.
I've got an issue with a WPF application that I'm writing. The app needs to be able to keep focus at all times. The computer it's running on is a highly specialized machine with the only purpose of running this application.
There is no keyboard connected to the machine (it has a touch screen), so the only thing that can steal focus is windows own "needy windows", such as windows update etc.
How can I make it so that my app retains focus at all times? Is it possible to make the entire app modal?
EDIT:
Thank you both for your answers. I think I'll end up using Topsmost for now, but I'll definitely check out the source of babysmash as that application works exactly the way I want mine to, in regards to the way it handles focus.
Look at the source of BabySmash. It is specifically designed to keep focus even under quite bizar circumstances. (It is a program designed to run at full screen and let babys smash on a keyboard - so quite some focus went into capturing all kinds of weird keyboard combinations and alert messages).
I would use
<Window ... Topmost="True">
i xaml. But maybe this is not what you are looking for