14 DAY TRIAL // A new resource available free of charge from Microsoft is designed to bring some of the Natural User Interface magic of Microsoft Surface to the company’s latest iteration of the Windows client. The software giant has released Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch into Beta, with the bits already available through the Download Center. Accompanying the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta is an .XPS file designed to deliver an overview of the resource and to help developers leverage some of the NUI innovations built for Microsoft Surface, but tailoring them to Windows 7 running on top of touch-capable computers.
“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,” Eric Havir, Sr. manager, Digital Communications at Microsoft/Surface, revealed. “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.”
The video embedded at the bottom of this article is must-watch content for devs looking to start taking advantage of the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch. Developers will be able to see Luis Cabrera-Cordon from the Microsoft Surface team demo the Toolkit, and even write a small Hello World touch application for Windows 7.
“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,” Havir added.
Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta provides a collection of controls, APIs (application programming interfaces), templates, sample applications and documentation that can be tapped, along with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), in order to build rich multi-touch apps for Windows 7. Devs will need to install the Beta on top of Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate.
Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.
Expression Blend 4 Beta is available for download here.