One of the major limitations of the Acer that Microsoft and AMD sent me is that it is not a tablet. I previously blogged about using an external Wacom graphics tablet to enable the pen and ink features in Vista. However, truth be told, using an external graphics tablet, while better than nothing certainly does not make the Ferrari a Tablet PC. It is simply not as easy and natural to write off to one side and have the ink appear on the screen in front of you.
So while you can add tablet functionality to an ink challenged mobile PC it does not a tablet make...
...But there is hope yet for the Ferrari to redeem itself. If it can't be a tablet, then the next best thing is for it to do is to empower real tablets by being used to develop tablet applications. Here's how to go about setting up a Vista machine to develop tablet applications.
Step 1. Ink enable your Vista development machine by adding a Wacom graphics tablet as I described here. You can develop tablet apps without any pen functionality, but it is really hard to get a feel for how your application feels when you are emulating ink with a mouse.
Step 2. Install your development environment. I am using Visual Studio 2005 Professional, but you could equally use one of the express editions.
Step 3. If you are installing Visual Studio 2005 or one of the Express Editions then install the appropriate version of Service Pack 1.
Step 4. Install the Windows Vista SDK. According to Gavin Gear...
This option does not install the InkAnalysis binaries, but exposes the Winforms, COM, and WPF InkAnalysis binaries – this allows you to use InkAnalysis with the Windows Presentation Framework!
Step 5. Install the Ink Analysis binaries. Gavin's step 4 gives you two options to achieve this, I went for B because I like command lines. Make sure you run the following as administrator. Also note that I've replaced the dashes (-i) in Gavin's example below with foreward slashes (/i).
Option b: Manually install the InkAnalysis binaries:
Open a Windows SDK cmd shell from Start->Programs->Microsoft Windows SDK->CMD Shell
Run the following commands:
cd %ProgramFiles%\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Tablet PC\v1.7
gacutil /i iacore.dll
gacutil /i microsoft.ink.analysis.dll
cd %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0\Bin
gacutil /i ialoader.dll
regsvr32 iacom.dll
And you're good to go! Gavin also provides a couple of good articles for getting started with Ink Analysis in WPF. Check out:
Tablet PC: Getting started with InkAnalysis in WPF
Shape recognition with the Tablet PC Platform InkAnalysis API