Automatically pop up tablet touch keyboard on WinForms input focus

The root cause seems to be that Winforms' textBox is not an AutomationElement, while the rest of the mentioned controls (ComboBoxes etc) are.

Quoting Markus von und zu Heber's accepted answer here:

We found it in the article "Automatic Touch Keyboard for TextBoxes in WPF Applications on Windows 8+", but it also works very good (and even easier!) for winforms. Thank you, Dmitry Lyalin!

1. Insert a reference to UIAutomationClient.dll to your project

2. In the form-load-handler of the application's main window, insert the following code:

   var asForm = System.Windows.Automation.AutomationElement.FromHandle(this.Handle);

I've been down this road a few times and have only ever been able to implement the taptip.exe option. And in turn close the window by killing the process. I also found out that with some registry hacks you can get the keyboard to default to the handwriting panel if you so choose. But then that only works in Win8 and fails in Win10. Here is what I've done in case anyone else finds this useful:

RegistryKey registryKey = Registry.CurrentUser.CreateSubKey("Software\\Microsoft\\TabletTip\\1.7");registryKey?.SetValue("KeyboardLayoutPreference", 0, RegistryValueKind.DWord);registryKey?.SetValue("LastUsedModalityWasHandwriting", 1, RegistryValueKind.DWord);Process.Start(@"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ink\TabTip.exe");

I need to give credit to this post for the registry idea: Windows 8 Desktop App: Open tabtip.exe to secondary keyboard (for numeric textbox)

As far as I can tell, launching osk.exe or tabtip.exe pretty much is the "standard" way of making this work. I've found no "official" solution so far.

However, if it were me doing this, I wouldn't be killing the process or sending keys to try and dismiss the keyboard. Instead, you can obtain the window handle when you launch the process, and use that to minimize the window and hide it from the taskbar.

Someone here has gotten the window handle just to close it, but it gives you the idea: Show & hiding the Windows 8 on screen keyboard from WPF

If you need me to, let me know and I'll see if I can find the time to do up a full example.