Touchscreen friendly WPF controls?

Question

I'm developing a WPF business application that needs to be usable on a touchscreen kiosk, as well as with conventional mouse and keyboard setups.

I'm looking for any touch-friendly control libraries that may be available, and / or any styles or themes for the standard WPF controls that improve the usability for touch, but I'm not really finding very much.

Commercial options are fine. (In fact, something like Telerik's RadControls with touch-friendly styling and function would be ideal. Their MetroTouch skin looks nice, but it's only for ASP.NET AJAX).

I've looked at Surface 2, but I'm not really developing a Surface app, plus this application may have to support XP and Vista, which I think is a no-go for Surface. That said, if anyone thinks Surface is the way to go I'd be interested in learning why.

Ideally, I'd prefer recommendations for solutions folks have actually used for a touch-friendly application.

Thanks!

Answer 1

One thing to consider is how capable your kiosk touchscreens are actually going to be. Most of the industrial touchscreens we've interfaced at my shop are quite crude, with low sensitivity (takes a fair bit of force to 'push') and no real 'swipe' support. This limits what you can accomplish in the way of a touch-friendly interface. With those limitations, you can't do much more than making buttons large and spaced sufficiently apart to prevent unintended presses. I wouldn't go too far down the road of making your interface touch-friendly without first evaluating some of the actual kiosk screens to see how responsive they are. You might find that the touch features you're looking to support don't actually work well on the hardware you're targeting.

That said, the technology is improving and I'm definitely interested to see what new controls evolve. I did some searching about a year ago and didn't find much. I'd mostly recommend rolling your own control templates for existing controls (we've done this to create things that look more like physical switches, for instance) as it's really not too difficult.