Windows® Phone 7 Application Development 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 9. Managing Screen Overlays

With Windows Phone 7 there is no hardware keyboard for the user to use as a means of typing text into a textbox. The user will use an on-screen keyboard to enter text. As a developer you do not need to do anything to make this keyboard appear on-screen, but you can help your application by specifying the input scope for each text input control you add to your application.

SOFTWARE INPUT PANEL (SIP)

If you add a textbox to your application, and the user puts the focus on that textbox, the phone will display a software input panel, as shown in Figure 9-1.

While the default software input panel will allow the user to enter text into the textbox regardless of the type of input that the textbox is collecting, you can improve the user experience by specifying an input scope that defines the type of data the textbox is collecting.

Specifying Input Scope

When you specify input scope for a textbox, the software input panel that is displayed is customized to provide the user with the characters typically needed to input the type of data being collected by the textbox. While there are over 60 types of input panel available for use, the types you will most likely use when building your applications are the following:

• Date

• EmailNameOrAddress

• FullFilePath

• Number

• Password

• PostalCode

• TelephoneNumber

• Text

• Url

Figure 9-1. FIGURE 9-1

If you change the InputScope property for the ...