Input mode in smart phone application

If you ever used TextBox control in smart phone application, you may found a bit confusing that input mode is selected to numbers. Entering alphabetic strings is then quite uncomfortable. Solution for this behavior is already included in .NET Compact Framework, but not so many coders knows about it.

InputModeEditor

Microsoft.WindowsCE.Forms namespace contains class InputModeEditor with single static method SetInputMode that takes two arguments. First parametr is the object that takes the input (usually TextBox), second one is the enumeration InputMode which contains values like AlphaABC, AlphaT9, Numeric etc.. Usage is obvious:

using Microsoft.WindowsCE.Forms;

......

InputModeEditor.SetInputMode(textBox1, InputMode.AlphaABC);