Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications

Thanks to Jonathan Brill for providing a link to a video of the PDC 2008 talk "Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications" by Reed Townsend and Anson Tsao. At 81 minutes the video is probably a bit long for anyone other than hardcore multi-touch developers, but it provides a pretty good idea of where Microsoft is going.

Apparently, WPF 4.0 will have built in support for multi-touch that will be a subset of the WPF support for multi-touch in Surface 2.0 (not yet released). Remember that Surface can handle not only multi-touch but also tags and blobs which is something that probably won't be in Win7. That said, Win7 will allow you to use both touch and stylus in combination which will be very valuable (Surface SDK 2.0 may also enable the use of the stylus but that's just a guess).

I suspect from the presentation that there are a lot of changes in Surface 2.0 SDK and WPF 4.0 with regard to multi-touch. You can do multi-touch today with Windows 7 BETA and WPF 3.5 sp1, but touch gestures are translated into stylus events so its not really the same as what will be in WPF 4.0. If you want to see WPF multi-touch demoed in the video, fast forward about 44 minutes into the video. The 30 minutes prior to that is dedicated to the native Win32 API for multi-touch.