Surface simulator

When developing applications for the Microsoft Surface you have a Surface Simulator that gets installed when you install the SDK. This can be used to simulate user input and contact with objects that are placed on the Surface-unit.

So far I have only tried the sample applications that are installed with the SDK and done some simple applications that don’t use any object recognition. But the simulator seems to work fine so far.

There are differens buttons button in the simulator that is used to simulate a finger or an object place on the Surface. To simulate the use of two fingers you can hold the left mouse button and then click on the right mouse button to place the finger. It is also possible to plug in two usb-mice to simulate two fingers or two objects.

Today I noticed a really cool feature. If you use a finger or object representation in the simulator and then scroll on the scroll wheel on the mouse the finger or object is rotated. This will come really handy when you use the simulator to display some sort of graphics around a placed object.

Just remember to start the simulator before starting the application from Visual Studio. Otherwise you will not get access to these features and your application will start in some other mode that I so far don’t know what it’s used for.