DIY: Multi-touch Gesture Recognition in Silverlight 3

Jesse Bishop has an interesting blog entry showing how to implement basic mult-touch gestures into your Silverlight 3 applications. Jesse's DIY (Do-it-Yourself) solution looks pretty solid but I haven't tried it myself so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.

Silverlight 3 comes with mutli-touch capabilities but none of the predefined gestures you would expect (pinch, rotate, move, etc.). I gave the folks at Adobe a hard time for their inability to support simultaneous gestures and touch input in the beta of Air - something I learned, with the help of Chris Cantrell, can be done with some custom development.

I would be remiss to give Silverlight 3 a pardon on the same topic. Why they could not build in simple support for basic gestures is beyond me - I suspect its a case of get-it-out-the-door as soon as possible.

Anyway, I'm very interested in developing multi-touch web interfaces which I plan to use on a site I've been developing, so being able to work on this now with Silverlight 3 is great. I haven't tried Jesse's custom gesture code, but it looks solid on the surface so I figured it was worth linking too. You can also learn about Silverlight 3's basic multi-touch contact support in a blog entry by Tim Heuer. It's also a good read and a nice primer for Jesse's blog.