Surface Controls in .NET 4
Yesterday, the Surface team announced that it is releasing its controls for use in Windows 7 touch applications.
"When .NET 4 ships next year with WPF 4, we will take our Surface controls and we will release them so that people who are writing touch apps on Windows 7 with WPF 4, can integrate the Surface controls," said Brad Carpenter, GM of software development, Surface.
Surface was built on WPF so many of the controls offer similar functionality –- Window, Menu, Button, Listbox, Scrollbar, Textbox –- but they support multiple users and multi-touch.
It sounds like the multi-touch APIs in WPF 4.0 and Surface SDK 2.0 will offer some level of consistency. Silverlight, which is a subset of WPF, also supports touch, starting in SL3. It's still unclear how the native Win32 multi-touch APIs in Windows 7 a.k.a. Windows Touch fit into the grand scheme, despite the Acer Tablet PC giveaway at this week's show. Which crosses the road first, the hardware or the software?
The biggest news from the Surface team at PDC is the general availability of the Surface SDK 1.0 SP1 Workstation Edition, which is free to all developers and offers PC-based simulator tools.
The Surface computing table, designed to support a natural use interface (gestures and object-recognition) was released in April 2008, but the SDK has been restricted to those with developer units, which cost upwards of $10,000 (more like $15,000). In Surface Workstation Made Broadly Available at PDC09, Brad Carpenter talks about the momentum that Surface has gained in the last year.
Express your views on WPF 4, Silverlight, Windows 7 multitouch and Surface, where are we headed? Comment below or drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 11/20/2009 at 2:55 PM