Win7 Multi-touch. Why wait until WPF4?

WPF 4 is going to fully integrate Win 7’s multi-touch capabilities. with Windows 7 being RTM, you don’t have to wait for WPF 4 to be released for developing multi-touch demos. You can get started today with the native Win7 APIs, or with the WindowsTouch library for .NET 3.5SP1. The .NET library is much easier to work with since the native APIs are rather low level and based on the existing tablet APIs.

Check out the link to the Win 7 .NET Interop Sample or the Channel9 video: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/MultitouchLibraryWin7/. 

Lynn’s blog post discusses the question on multi-touch with .NET 3.5 or 4.0: http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/archive/2009/06/15/socaldevgal-wishes-to-decide-net-3-5-or-net-4-0-for-windows-7-multi-touch-application-development.aspx. It’s got more useful links to multi-touch development on Win7 resources as well.

At least until WPF4 ships, there is a viable option to build production apps with multi-touch. There are some differences how WindowsTouch and WPF4 implement things, and you’re probably encountering a little bit of re-work, but both options are based on WPF and most of your UI and you code-behind should stay the same and you learn the UI Design Guidelines for Touch right away.

Enjoy.