An introduction to building HP TouchSmart-hosted applications and a step-by-step tutorial for a “Hello World”

Building Your First TouchSmart Application
A developers guide to the TouchSmart Platform

Introduction

The Hewlett-Packard TouchSmart PC is an innovative new PC form-factor which affords users the unique ability to control interactions using only their hands. Through the use of a very stylish “10 foot” style user interface, the user can simply touch the integrated screen and perform most essential functions – viewing photos, listening to music, and surfing the web – all without using a keyboard or mouse.

The TouchSmart interface can be considered an entirely new user-interface platform – and now HP has opened up this platform to the entire developer community. With the release of the TouchSmart Application Developer Guidelines you can now build applications which run on this unique platform – and cater to its expanding user-base.

This article walks you through building your first TouchSmart application, with the goal of creating a basic application template which you can use for all your TouchSmart projects.

Getting Started

In order to follow the steps in this document, you will need to be familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and .NET development with C#. This article assumes a basic knowledge of these technologies. Please visit the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) at http://msdn.microsoft.com for more information.

In addition, the following is required:

• TouchSmart PC (model IQ504 or IQ506, current at the time of this writing)
• Latest TouchSmart software (available from http://support.hp.com)
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Express (free) or Professional Edition
• HP TouchSmart Application Development Guidelines (available from here).
• .NET Framework 3.5 (although the same techniques can be used to build an application using Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 3.0)

It is recommended you install Visual Studio 2008 on the TouchSmart PC for ease of development, however it is not required. Since the TouchSmart application we are building is simply a Windows Presentation Foundation application it will run on any Vista or Windows XP PC with .NET 3.5.

Important Background Information

Before getting started you should know some important background information about a typical TouchSmart application:

• To best integrate with the TouchSmart look-and-feel you should develop your application using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• The application runs as a separate process with a window that has the frame removed, it is not running within the TouchSmart shell process.
• The TouchSmart shell is responsible for launching your application. Additionally, the TouchSmart shell will control the position and sizing of your window.
• You must create three separate UI layouts for your application. This is not as difficult as it sounds; only one layout is interactive with controls – the other two layouts are for display only.
• Design your application for a “10 foot” viewing experience. Plan to increase font and control sizes if you are converting an existing application.
• Do not use pop-up windows in your application. This is perhaps the most unique requirement in building a TouchSmart application. The Windows “MessageBox” and other pop-up windows are not supported and should not be used. The best model to follow is to build your application like it was going to run in a web browser.
• Your application must support 64-bit Vista, as this is the operating system used on the TouchSmart PC.

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