You can make it much faster and easier for users to enter data in your Windows Phone apps by changing the on-screen keyboard. Windows Phone supports 10 built-in, on-screen keyboard options. For example, one option supports an auto-complete and emoticon menu, and another option includes the @ and .com keys, which is helpful for email and webpage form fields. In addition, Windows Phone supports several on-screen keyboards for numeric input, such as for dialing a phone number.

This sample lets you see all 10 built-in, on-screen keyboard options, and explains the highlights of each keyboard. For more info about each on-screen keyboard option, including their corresponding input scopes, see On-Screen Keyboard Input Scope Index for Windows Phone.

To run this sample, you must have Windows Phone SDK 7.1 installed. To get started, go to the Windows Phone Dev Center.

To run the sample

  1. Double-click sdkKeyboardIndex.sln to open the solution.

  2. On the Build menu (or the Debug menu in Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone), click Build Solution. (Ctrl+Shift+B)

  3. On the Debug menu, click Start Debugging. (F5)

Note:

This sample is packaged as a Windows Phone 7.5 project. It can be converted to a Windows Phone 8 project, by changing the target Windows Phone OS version of the project. To create a Windows Phone 8 project, you must be running the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 on Visual Studio 2012. You can download the latest version of the SDK from http://dev.windowsphone.com/downloadsdk.

To convert the sample to a Windows Phone 8 project:

  1. Double-click the .sln file to open the solution in Visual Studio.

  2. Right-click the project in the Solution Explorer and select Properties. This opens the Project Properties window.

  3. In the Application tab of the Project Properties window, select Windows Phone OS 8.0 from the Target Windows Phone OS Version dropdown. A dialog will appear asking if you want to upgrade this project to Windows Phone OS 8.0.

  4. Select Yes to upgrade the project.