So I needed to set up an app to print when the user presses control+p. Seems fairly straight forward right, after all there are all kinds of multiple key press codes like this in the world ctrl + P is print, ctrl + F8 could be something else, etc. etc… I was shocked when I went looking on the net for a good way to implement this in C# .NET and found no good examples, so I made my own keydown event handler, so here it is.

private List<string>  pressedKeys = new List<string>();
private void ShellForm_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
{
pressedKeys.Add(e.KeyValue.ToString());
bool x = pressedKeys.Contains(“80″); //P key

bool y = pressedKeys.Contains(“17″); //CTRL Key

if (x & y & pressedKeys.IndexOf(“80″)>pressedKeys.IndexOf(“17″)) // so it has to have P and CTRL and CTRL has to be before P
{
MessageBox.Show(“you pressed CNTRL+P good job stupid…”);
_btnPrint_Click(null, e);
pressedKeys.Clear();
}
int count = pressedKeys.Count;
if (count>2)
{
pressedKeys.Clear();
}

}

the message window was just for my benefit… gotta remember to take it out. Let me know if you see, or know of, a better way to do this.  The one thing i see missing is some sort of timer to limit the time between key presses. As it is now a user could press “Ctrl” and then wait any amount of time and press “P” and it would print.

Cheers,
Tim

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.