Windows Phone 7 Quick Tip #6 – Use InputScope to give tour users a Better Experience

Typing on a virtual keyboard sucks.  Windows Phone 7 does as a good of a job as anything out there, however you can make this even better in your applications by using the InputScope property on your TextBox controls.  This basically allows you to present a context correct keyboard.  For example, if you are having the user enter an email address, you can use an InputScope of “EmailSmtpAddress”.  The one that makes typing long text on your device so-much-easier is “Text”.  The “Text” input scope does predictive text and word correction.  If you leave InputScope blank you won’t get this nice feature.

To use InputScope simply add the InputScope attribute to your XAML like:

<TextBox Text=”{Binding Words}”  InputScope=”Text” />

For an awesome post describing this in much greater detail check out James Ashely’s post here.

-twb