Introduction:

    We are more convenient with our old methods of writing information. We are more convenient with our pens than our key boards.  The basic concept of the pen communication depends on the following.

1. a writing tool, pen(say) which gives out some ink leaving the marks in a writing medium(say paper).
2. The ink mark left by the pen is persisted in the writing medium, paper for further reference.

The same functionality is achieved by todays advanced technology. Tablet PC’s

Applications targetting the Tablet PC’s are also well known as ‘Ink Aware applications’. It’s the hot talk in the IT world.  Microsoft provides us with the flexibility to develop windows applications targetting Tablet PC’s.

Start to develop with Tablet PC SDK:

The software pre requisites that are needed:

1. Windows XP Tablet PC edition.
2. VS6/VS.NET

You can install Tablet PC SDK in windows XP and use it to develop Applications targetting Tablet PCs. But u cannot exploit the recognition functionality available.

Basic Terms in Tablet PC Development:

   In analagous to manual writing and our conventional pen use we need to achieve the following to mimic the functionality of a pen on paper.

1. Ink Collection – collecting the ink this is done by Tablet pc interface. The pen(stylus) does not have real ink things in it.
2. Ink Data Management- managing information about the ink like strokes their length . we will cover this later
3. Ink Recognition.- recognising the strokes and conversion to ur language.

Developing your first Tablet PC Application:

1.      Create a new Windows application.

2.      Add reference to  ‘ Microsoft Tablet PC API‘ or Microsoft.Ink from .Net components tab in the references dialog box.

3.      Now it is all set to put in some piece of code for your windows app.

4.      In the code editor of the form, import Microsoft.Ink namespace.

5.      In the code editor of the form, create an object of  InkCollector by passing its constructor a handle to the current window in the form load event.

6.      set the enabled property of the InkCollector object to true,

7.      Yeah u have created your InkAware Windows form. Just run it.

using Microsoft.Ink;

namespace WindowsApplication1

{

    public partial class InkCollectionSample : Form

    {

        private InkCollector objInkcol;

        public InkCollectionSample()

        {

            InitializeComponent();

        }

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            // pass the handle of this window to the InkCollector object

            objInkcol = new InkCollector(this.Handle);

            // Enable the inkCollector.

            objInkcol.Enabled = true;

        }

    }

}

You could notice that when your mouse hovers over the form it turns into a dot.