In the previous article we discussed our motivation and another possible approach (which I can’t recommend) and saw how to set up the environment. Now it’s time to write some code. MSAA and UI Automation To tell Windows to show the on-screen keyboard, we must inform it that the active control is a TextBox control (or, being more general, an editable control with the ability to display a […]

Today, more and more Windows-based devices are touch-friendly, often missing the hardware keyboard completely. Let’s put aside the question how convenient it is to type more than few words only by touch keyboard (it’s a nuisance), Windows has (of course) built-in support for these scenarios. From the user’s point it works in the way that after a control receives an input focus, the on-screen keyboard automatically […]

This is gonna be simple. There are certain situations when you need your custom control not to receive input focus (or not to steal the focus from another control when it is ‘activated’). In the simplest form, this is easy to achieve by deriving your control from Windows.Forms.Control and removing the ControlStyles.Selectable flag. So it may look like the following one: Ok. So far, so good. […]