Eli Arbel (@aelij)

One of my clients recently needed to hook up a USB barcode reader to their app. Input from the reader needed to be redirected and handled by a special service, and ignored by the rest of the application. WPF has a property named Device in its KeyEventArgs class, but unfortunately it turns out that it uses the same instance for all input devices hooked up to the PC.

So I set out to look for a solution. It seems that normally Windows does not provide this information in WM_KEY{UP, DOWN} messages. You had to register your process to receive WM_INPUT messages, which contain information about which HID (Human Interface Device) was used. These messages are sent in addition to the standard input messages (keyboard, mouse, touch).

I found a good project in Code Project that encapsulated most of the functionality I needed. Code Project now has Git workspaces and allows you to fork them, which I did:

https://workspaces.codeproject.com/aelij/using-raw-input-from-c-to-handle-multiple-keyboards

Update: The CodeProject decided to take down its Workspaces Git platform (without so much as an email). I’ve had to restore the project from a compiled binary. Now it’s hosted (hopefully permanently ;)) on Github:

https://github.com/aelij/RawInputProcessor

This solution contains a unified API for both WPF and Windows Forms (which you should avoid whenever possible ;). It also allows marking events as handled. It uses the PeekMessage function to remove the WM_KEY{UP, DOWN} messages, so WPF’s InputManager never receives them. I’ve also cleaned up the code and fixed a few bugs and a few possible leaks.