Touch screen are great and we’ve seen their use on phone and slates but sometimes these screens still just are not big enough.     For those who desire bigger touch screens, Microsoft surface may be the answer.     Microsoft surface has been around a while and there have been significant changes with version 2.0.   Version 2.0 introduces new functionality and support for more compact hardware.    A glance at the Microsoft Surface team web site reveals some incredibly interesting uses for the technology.

The samples provided are a great introduction to writing code for the platform.    VB versions of all the samples have been created and they provide a introduction to what is possible. 

To develop Surface applications using VB requires installation of a few prerequisites:

• VS2010 SP1 (Required because VB is using VB Core feature)
• WP7 SDK Tools  (Installs the XNA components )
• Surface 2.0 Runtime and SDK  (The important surface tools)
• VB Surface 2.0 Samples

And for those who feel inspired to create new surface projects from scratch we have included the project templates.    To install these project templates after installing the above prerequisites – you can find then in the Visual Studio Gallery (Tools > Extension Manager) searching on the “VB_Surface” and install the new project templates.

You can now start up Visual Studio and the two surface templates should appear for Visual Basic as well as the existing two C# surface templates.   This is another technology that is now targetable by VB developers and that utilizes the VB Core functionality.

Enjoy….

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