Scanning arrow keys from keyboard.

[hjjayakrishnan]

I'm building this windows forms application in visual c++ 2010, where in i want to control my robot's movement(via COM port) through arrow keys. I'm pretty new to visual c++, i've managed to control it by click, but wasn't quite successful implementing the arrow keys. I did check out the msdn forums, but all it did was confuse me. I hope you guys could help me out.
Thanks in advance.

[Eri523]

As I envision your scenario, it's probably most adequate to handle the keystrokes at the form level by setting up a KeyDown event handler for your form. You'll find constants representing the arrow keys in the Keys enumeration. You may need to set the form's KeyPreview property to true to prevent controls that consume arrow keystrokes themselves (like a textbox) from intercepting the keystrokes before the form gets notice of them.

However, as I understand your description, you already have implemented robot control by button clicks. In this case it may be niftier to simply dispatch the keystrokes to be handled as button clicks by using a class like the one from http://forums.codeguru.com/showthrea...ngle-menu-item. As posted, the class is designed to work with menu items, not buttons, but it should not be too complicated to modify it accordingly. (In fact, in a bunch of my real-life apps I'm using a version of that class that automatically does support both menu items and arbitrary controls, including buttons, and not even that modification was really spectacular. Otherwise the class is practically identical to the posted version.)

[hjjayakrishnan]

Thanks a million, Eri523. It worked like magic.