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The unbearable sadness of evolution to WPF/Silverlight

Saturday, March 28, 2009

This week, while doing Silverlight 2.0 development work, we stumbled upon weird behaviour of the KeyDown event with Backspace and Delete key handling. Being familiar with the WM_KEYDOWN message for over 15 years in Windows applications, it always allowed us to fully control the relationship between keys pressed and how a control handles the key. One would think that 15 years later, we'd still be able to do at least the same and preferably more. Now consider following simple scenario: a TextBox control in a WPF application:

<Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.Window1"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
    <Grid>
        <TextBox Height="23" Margin="42,53,116,0" Name="textBox1" 
        VerticalAlignment="Top" KeyDown="textBox1_KeyDown"/>
    </Grid>
</Window>

with the C# event handler code:

namespace WpfApplication1
{
    public partial class Window1 : Window
    {
        public Window1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void textBox1_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
        {
            if (e.Key == Key.Delete)
                System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("DEL");
            if (e.Key == Key.Back)
                System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("BACK");
        }
    }
}

Surprisingly, the KeyDown event is never triggered when the Delete or Backspace keys are pressed (in latest version WPF 3.5). Why isn't this suddenly no longer important to be signaled of pressing the Delete or Backspace key?
Now, move on to WPF light or its little sister Silverlight and test what the behaviour of the same scenario is in a Silverlight application:

<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication1.Page"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
    Width="400" Height="300">
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
        <TextBox Height="23" Margin="42,53,116,0" Name="textBox1" 
        VerticalAlignment="Top" KeyDown="textBox1_KeyDown"/>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

with the same event handler code:

namespace SilverlightApplication1
{
    public partial class Page : UserControl
    {
        public Page()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void textBox1_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
        {
            if (e.Key == Key.Delete)
                System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("DEL");
            if (e.Key == Key.Back)
                System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("BACK");
        }
    }
}

More surprises! The lightweight WPF version named Silverlight comes a little closer to what one intuitively would expect. It will trigger the KeyDown event for Delete or Backspace key when the TextBox is empty, otherwise, no KeyDown event when either Delete or Backspace keys are pressed. Time to move to the deprecated WinForms technology and let's see how the KeyDown event behaves there:

namespace WindowsFormsApplication1
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void textBox1_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
        {
            if (e.KeyCode == Keys.Back)
                System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("BACK");
            if (e.KeyCode == Keys.Delete)
                System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("DEL");

        }
    }
}

Here we get the event for every Delete or Backspace key pressed as was the case with the WM_KEYDOWN for the past 15 years in every C, C++, Delphi, Visual Basic application.
When contacting Microsoft about this issue, the answer was that this is "by design". Sure, inconsistency has always been "by design" at Microsoft.

Bruno Fierens

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The unbearable sadness of evolution to WPF/Silverlight

Saturday, March 28, 2009

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