Windows CE Programming

This is again a keyToggle application. An application that works in background using a keyboard hook.

After keyToggleCtrl has been started, it will install a keyboard hook and watches the keyboard messages for the appearance of the toggle, or as I call it, the sticky key.

When the sticky key is detected, keyToggle Ctrl will watch the keyboard messages for the keys listed in a keytable (default is watching for presses of the number keys 0 to 9). If the pressed key matches a key in the keytable, keytogglectrl will remove the message from the window message queue and instead send the key found in CharTable with Control pressed before and released after the replaced key.

For example, you press the sticky key, the LED defined by LedID should light and if you then press 0, keyToggleCtrl will send instead Control+C to the active application.

KeyTest3AK IMAGE

Continue reading ‘Mobile Development: another keyboard hooking tool: keyToggleCtrl’ »

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As you may know my keyToggle app to be able to use the number keys on a windows mobile device as function keys, here is another one that enables you to enter special national chars, like Å, Ä Æ etc. directly via the keyboard. You must specify 10 keys and there UTF-8 replacements. Configuration is done via the registry:

3.0        added code for read/write reg for CharTable and KeyTable
 REGEDIT4

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Intermec\KeyToggleChar]
 "KeyTable"=hex:\
 30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39
 "CharTable"=hex:\
 C6,00,E6,00,D8,00,F8,00,C5,00,E5,00,C2,00,E2,00,C4,00,E4,00
 "LEDid"=dword:00000001
 "autoFallback"=dword:00000000
 "Timeout"=dword:00000003
 "StickyKey"=dword:00000074

 KeyTable     holds a list of 10 keys which will be 'remapped'
 CharTable    holds  list of UniChar codes to use as replacement
 LEDid        defines the ID of the LED to use for showing sticky state
 autoFallback defines, if the sticky state is reset after a mapped key is pressed.
              Use 0, if you dont want the sticky state to fallback after keypress
 TimeOut      defines a timout after which sticky state will be reset

To get the UTF-8 word entries for Unicode chars, see for example here: http://www.unicode.org/charts/charindex.html

The default mapping used here is defined as follows and maps the keys 0-9 to:

0x00c6, 0x00e6, 0x00d8, 0x00f8, 0x00C5, 0x00e5, 0x00c2, 0x00e2, 0x00c4, 0x00e4
 AE        ae     O/       o/      A°      a°      A^      a^      Ä       ä

The main problem I had was finding a function to get the window handle of the current input active window. Finally I found GetForegroundKeyboardTarget() (after some days of searching).

Continue reading ‘keyToggleChar – a tool to enter UTF-8 national chars via keyboard’ »

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KeyToggle

Extend your keyboard to get function keys by pressing numbers.

With keytoggle you can define a ‘sticky’ key that will change the beahviour of the number keys. As long as the sticky key is ‘active’, number keys from 1 to 0 will produce the function keys F1 to F10. If sticky key is active, the left LED will light in green.

To start keytoggle just tap it or let it start by a link in StartUp. If keytoggle is loaded, you can see a small yellow arrow sign in the taskbar.

If you tap this symbol, you are asked, if you want to unload the app. If the registry does not have values defined for keytoggle, it will use default values. If you try to launch keytoggle a second time you will get a message box. Only one instance of keytoggle can run at a time.

Using the registry you can define the behaviour of the sticky key. In example, you can have the sticky key remain active until it is pressed again, let it ‘go off’ or ‘fallback’ after a period of time or let it fallback after a number key has been pressed. If the sticky key is pressed again, it will always fallback.

Continue reading ‘Mobile Development: Hooking the keyboard – KeyToggle’ »

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Here is my approach to make a compact framework form fullscreen:

A class that enables you to

• lock/unlock the taskbar
• hide/show the taskbar and resize form to occupy the whole screen
• hide the menu bar but show/hide SIP
• disables OS to capture Function keys like F6/F7 for Volume Up/Down etc and makes these keys available to be used in your app. Also the use of the WinKey does not open the Start Menu

(You are right, you dont see ‘fullscreen’ in the screen shot, BUT the taskbar is locked!)

Continue reading ‘Full Screen Engine to make Compact Framework applications fullscreen’ »

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