How do I Emulate touch events without using touch screen

Question

I'm currently trying to develop a touch screen application with:

• Windows 7
• Visual Studio 2013
• C# - WPF

The place I'm working at is going to receive a touch screen (actually a layer to put on a flat screen).

I would like to be able to generate touch inputs in order to develop and test the application without the screen.

All the resources I find, are either quite old or complicated.

What is the best way today to develop and test touch screen applications, without the touch screen ?

Answer 1

One way to do it is to attach a second mouse to your work station. Then you can test multitouch (resizing, rotating, etc.). I managed to do that years ago. You need appropriate drivers though. Please check the moultitouch project. I think I was using that or something similar.

You can find more suggestions in this SuperUser post. But I never tried them.

EDIT

After checking your comments I understand your issue better. Try this StackOverflow thread. It's discussing rerouting mouse into touch events. Check also Blake.NUI project - it improves WPF 4 to better handle touch interaction (among other things).

In the project you will find MouseTouchDevice class that should help you converting mouse into touch events:

 /// <summary>
/// Used to translate mouse events into touch events, enabling a unified 
/// input processing pipeline.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>This class originally comes from Blake.NUI - http://blakenui.codeplex.com</remarks>
public class MouseTouchDevice : TouchDevice, ITouchDevice
{
#region Class Members

private static MouseTouchDevice device;

public Point Position { get; set; }

#endregion

#region Public Static Methods

public static void RegisterEvents(FrameworkElement root)
{
    root.PreviewMouseDown += MouseDown;
    root.PreviewMouseMove += MouseMove;
    root.PreviewMouseUp += MouseUp;
    root.LostMouseCapture += LostMouseCapture;
    root.MouseLeave += MouseLeave;
}

#endregion

#region Private Static Methods

private static void MouseDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    if (device != null &&
        device.IsActive)
    {
        device.ReportUp();
        device.Deactivate();
        device = null;
    }
    device = new MouseTouchDevice(e.MouseDevice.GetHashCode());
    device.SetActiveSource(e.MouseDevice.ActiveSource);
    device.Position = e.GetPosition(null);
    device.Activate();
    device.ReportDown();
}

private static void MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
    if (device != null &&
        device.IsActive)
    {
        device.Position = e.GetPosition(null);
        device.ReportMove();
    }
}

private static void MouseUp(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    LostMouseCapture(sender, e);
}

static void LostMouseCapture(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
    if (device != null &&
        device.IsActive)
    {
        device.Position = e.GetPosition(null);
        device.ReportUp();
        device.Deactivate();
        device = null;
    }
}

static void MouseLeave(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
    LostMouseCapture(sender, e);
}

#endregion

#region Constructors

public MouseTouchDevice(int deviceId) :
    base(deviceId)
{
    Position = new Point();
}

#endregion

#region Overridden methods

public override TouchPointCollection GetIntermediateTouchPoints(IInputElement relativeTo)
{
    return new TouchPointCollection();
}

public override TouchPoint GetTouchPoint(IInputElement relativeTo)
{
    Point point = Position;
    if (relativeTo != null)
    {
        point = this.ActiveSource.RootVisual.TransformToDescendant((Visual)relativeTo).Transform(Position);
    }

    Rect rect = new Rect(point, new Size(1, 1));

    return new TouchPoint(this, point, rect, TouchAction.Move);
}

#endregion
}

Answer 2

I have used this with developer preview of win 8. It supports single touch, zoom gestures and the rotation gestures.