Launch: Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta
We’ve got some great news for Windows Touch developers. Today we’ve launched a toolkit for Windows Touch that allows developers to use some of the same controls that are used by developers on Microsoft Surface hardware today, but for PCs using Windows Touch.
Before you can use the toolkit, you must have Microsoft Windows 7 Operating System and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express Edition, as well as Microsoft .NET 4.0 installed on your computer. The .NET 4.0 Framework and the Surface Toolkit support input devices such as mouse, stylus, and touch. With the Surface Toolkit, you can develop an application that supports various types of input.
To create great natural user interfaces, a focus on user experience design as well as testing on multi-touch hardware are essential. To test your application in a touch-enabled environment, your computer must have a touch-screen digitizer.
- Video: Announcing the Toolkit
- Video: Introduction to the toolkit on Channel 9
- Download: Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta
You can also visit Surface.com Technical Resources to learn more about developing on Microsoft Surface hardware.
- Eric (follow Surface on Twitter and Facebook)
Comments
Anonymous
April 12, 2010
the documentation http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=801907a7-b2dd-4e63-9ff3-8a2e63932a74 talks about issues with Blend "Expression Blend crashes when you create a project Issue: Expression Blend crashes when you attempt to create a WPF project. Reason: Surface Toolkit is designed to work with Expression Blend 4.0 Release Candidate. You may be using an earlier version of Expression Blend. Resolution: Install Expression Blend 4.0 Release Candidate. (Specifically, do not install Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4.0.)" Where can we get EB 4RC?Anonymous
April 12, 2010
i installed Surface Toolkit and runtime,but i cannot find item templates in Surface --> Windows Touch in VS2010RC,it displays "no items found"... beacuse my VS is RC not Release? i reinstall Surface toolkit and runtime but the problem still exists and...where's EB4 RC?Anonymous
April 12, 2010
Thanks for the tools. Been waiting on this for some time now. I noticed the ElementMenu control is not included. Any plans to add this added to RTM version? What other Surface controls did not make it in this release? Any plans to release in-depth tutorials in near future regarding this toolkit? Thanks again. Looking forward to playing with the bits and seeing what Surface v2 has to offer in future:)Anonymous
April 12, 2010
Any plans to add the Sketch Styles from SketchFlow to Surface Controls?Anonymous
April 13, 2010
Surface controls not in the Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta: ElementMenu and TagVisualizer.Anonymous
April 13, 2010
Thons / jawss, Please use the Expression Blend 4 Beta from Expression Blend 4 Beta that you can download from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=6f014e07-0053-4aca-84a7-cd82f9aa989f We will update the links in our download page. Thanks! -Luis.Anonymous
April 13, 2010
Thons, Regarding your templates not showing up. Could you try repairing the Toolkit installation and see if the issue goes away? We officially support the release version of Visual Studio, but you may be able to get by with the older version. Thanks! -LuisAnonymous
April 14, 2010
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April 15, 2010
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April 15, 2010
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April 16, 2010
Wondering what the best practice is for porting an existing Surface application that makes extensive use of SurfaceUserControl to use this new framework. I noticed in v1.5 the SurfaceUserControl base class doesn't exist in Microsoft.Surface.Presentation.Controls - is there an alternative we should be using, or is this just not supported yet?Anonymous
April 19, 2010
Thons, I'm suffering from the same problem , did you find any workaround ?Anonymous
April 21, 2010
I'm trying to deploy a simple Surface application using VS2010 and ClickOnce and keep getting an error that the assembly Microsoft.Surface.Presentation must be installed in the GAC first when I try to deploy to a machine without VS2010 (but with both .NET4 and the Surface Toolkit Runtime for Touch installed). any ideas?Anonymous
April 22, 2010
ChadEmm / Mrme, You don't need a special SurfaceUserControl in the toolkit. Use a normal UserControl. Thanks! -Luis.Anonymous
June 23, 2010
Its first eveing of mine trying surface toolkit. really amazing control library Beginner question: In the scatterview the wave visualization effect which follows my fingure, what actually is it? And If i wanna achieve same kind of effect in WPF App. Any idea...Anonymous
June 28, 2010
Black Designer, I am not sure if you are referring to the touch visualizations (called ripples in the video at www.youtube.com/watch) or maybe you are referring to the "sheen" of the ScatterView. The sheen is just the animation of a linear gradient brush. Thanks. -Luis.Anonymous
October 21, 2010
Just wondering about the roadmap for the toolkit - we are already using it heavily in real-world MT projects, but it is still Beta since April 2010. Any plans for further development / RTM soon? Thanks, GuidoAnonymous
January 13, 2011
such an improvement since the ones I saw this past summer in sacramento, ca check it out! www.youtube.com/watchAnonymous
April 28, 2011
Hi Luis, Will the toolkit 2.0 beta with .Net 4.0 , work on Surface 1 or toolkit1.0 with .NET 3.5 work on Surface 2? Thanks in advance!!! AshishAnonymous
February 09, 2012
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