New features in Silverlight 3: Mouse Wheel & Multitouch

Silverlight 3 introduces support for mouse wheel input and multitouch input. Today I’ll write about this features.

Mouse Wheel

MouseWheel event is only raised and able to be handled for clients running Internet Explorer and the Microsoft Windows operating system, or that are running out-of-browser. To process mouse wheel information for other clients, you must use the HTML document object model event handling for OnMouseWheel that are available to client scripting and the HTML bridge. I also have noticed that the managed event doesn’t work well with transparent visual root.

•  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd759034(VS.95).aspx

Multitouch

Multitouch requires hardware that is capable of recording touch pressure that occurs on a surface (a tablet PC device or a graphics tablet). It also requires an environment (platform and operating system, hosting application such as a browser) that can propagate the touch input to an application. You can test new Silverlight feature with Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8. Silverlight is registered for raw touch input, not gestures. In general, it promotes raw touch input to mouse events (however, you can disable promotion).

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd894494(VS.95).aspx
• http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/alex_golesh/archive/2009/07/10/silverlight-3-quick-tip-multitouch-support-on-windows-7.aspx