Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch

This is a great start, but still after all these years Windows Tablets seem to be lacking momentum. They wil get left behind with the iPad and the rumored Google Tablet. 

Maybe we'll see Surface beats come to the tablet? We need more sweet apps like that. There are virtually none now.

I agree that the tablet platform has languished for several years now, but there's hardly any way to say anything will get left behind by a rumoured Google tablet which even if it exists is a complete unknown - Google are perfectly capable of producing a piece of crap.

Does the actual multi-touch now finally work with Dell Latitude XT?

Thanks Surface team we finally get our tentacular hands on win7-certified multitouch controls

Well, the first thing we notice as developers is that WPF performance is absolutely inadequate for serious graphics development.

That is old news, but somehow i was hoping Surface toolkit would bring some hard-core tweaks (like fixed fps rendering to get smooth animations and so on).
Nonetheless, apps on the Surface seem smoother than in Win7.. there must be something under the hood in the os (vista) configuration.

Then, the whole Direct2D topic and early samples on Win7 touch are there to confuse us... we want performance!!

When will we get a _clear_ roadmap of how MS graphics technologies are meant to work together?
(WPF,Direct2D,Direct3D,XNA...)

Related Tech-Off topic:

http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/TechOff/543754-WPF-Performance-for-serious-multi-touch-development/

Thank you!
Stefano Baraldi

http://www.onthetabletop.eu

hi i need to know  what is the Resolution of the surface camera?

The Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta will work on any Windows 7 Touch PC hardware. If the driver for the specific machine is properly written, the toolkit should work on top of that machine.

Microsoft Surface actually uses 5 infrared cameras, the image gets stitched together and reported through the Raw Image APIs to you. Take a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee804751.aspx for more information.

Notice that the Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta obviously uses different input. It actually uses the input from the touch enabled PC (no cameras included).

thanks!

-Luis.

Luis,

The performance of Surface controls seems to be better than regular WPF controls.

May I ask how did you achieve it?

Thanks!

I guess, I may NOT ask...

@ivan_:Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961
(Clarke's third law)

@LuisCabrera:I installed  Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch on VS2010 where is installed WP7 toolkit with XNA 4.0. The samples included with  Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch doesn't compile because in the XNA 4.0 for WP7 is totally missing the AudioEngine class
Any idea how to solve this problem ?

Found the solution.
Added reference to microsoft.xna.framework.xact