Shawn rocks. He just explained something to me in the newsgroups that I think is really cool which is an internal windows thing.

A little background. The TabletSDK has clipboard functionality. You can use it to copy ink data from one ink object to another. You can also use it for a few other formats. However, I saw in the samples that you can select multiple formats to persist to the clipboard when you copy (one of them being BMP so you can paste into PAINT, for example). I didn’t understand how, if you said okay I want these three formats, how PAINT gets the one it needs.

Pretty simple – this is what Windows is designed to do. You program an application to grok different formats and look for a default format (PASTE) or choose another format (PASTE SPECIAL).  Therefore if I know I want my end user to be able to paste into some generic windows graphic application, I need to ensure that I choose at least the BMP format when I send my ink to the clipboard. But heck, they might have another ink enabled application on their computer, so I should also make sure the special ISF (ink serialized format) is in there too. So after they copy, they would be able to paste in a variety of applications whether ink-enabled or not.

Shawn is a real expert with Tablet PC development and just wrote an article on ink enabling your web apps on the Tablet PC Dev Center.

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