Extracting keyboard layouts from windows

Question

OK, this is a slightly weird question.

We have a touch-screen application (i.e., no keyboard). When users need to enter text, the application shows virtual keyboard - hand-built in WinForms.

Making these things by hand for each new language is monkey work. I figure that windows must have this keyboard layout information hiding somewhere in some dll. Would there be anyway to get this information out of windows?

Other ideas welcome (I figure at least generating the thing from a xml file has got to be better than doing it by hand in VS).

(Note: having said all which, I note that there is a Japanese keyboard, state machine and all..., so XML might not be sufficient)

UPDATE: pretty good series on this subject (I believe) here

Answer 1

Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator can load system keyboards and export them as .klc files. Since it’s written in .NET you can use Reflector to see how it does that, and use reflection to drive it. Here's a zip file of .klc files for the 187 keyboards in Windows 8 created using the below C# code. Note that I originally wrote this for Windows XP, and now with Windows 8 and the on-screen keyboard, it is really slow and seems to crash the taskbar :/ However, it does work :)

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.IO;
using System.Reflection;

class KeyboardExtractor {

    static Object InvokeNonPublicStaticMethod(Type t, String name,
            Object[] args)
    {
        return t.GetMethod(name, BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.NonPublic)
            .Invoke(null, args);
    }

    static void InvokeNonPublicInstanceMethod(Object o, String name,
            Object[] args)
    {
        o.GetType().GetMethod(name, BindingFlags.Instance |
                BindingFlags.NonPublic) .Invoke(o, args);
    }

    static Object GetNonPublicProperty(Object o, String propertyName) {
        return o.GetType().GetField(propertyName,
                BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic)
            .GetValue(o);
    }

    static void SetNonPublicField(Object o, String propertyName, Object v) {
        o.GetType().GetField(propertyName,
                BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic)
            .SetValue(o, v);
    }

    [STAThread] public static void Main() {
        System.Console.WriteLine("Keyboard Extractor...");

        KeyboardExtractor ke = new KeyboardExtractor();
        ke.extractAll();

        System.Console.WriteLine("Done.");
    }

    Assembly msklcAssembly;
    Type utilitiesType;
    Type keyboardType;
    String baseDirectory;

    public KeyboardExtractor() {
        msklcAssembly = Assembly.LoadFile("C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4\\MSKLC.exe");
        utilitiesType = msklcAssembly.GetType("Microsoft.Globalization.Tools.KeyboardLayoutCreator.Utilities");
        keyboardType = msklcAssembly.GetType("Microsoft.Globalization.Tools.KeyboardLayoutCreator.Keyboard");

        baseDirectory = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory();
    }

    public void extractAll() {

        DateTime startTime = DateTime.UtcNow;

        SortedList keyboards = (SortedList)InvokeNonPublicStaticMethod(
                utilitiesType, "KeyboardsOnMachine", new Object[] {false});

        DateTime loopStartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;

        int i = 0;
        foreach (DictionaryEntry e in keyboards) {
            i += 1;
            Object k = e.Value;

            String name = (String)GetNonPublicProperty(k, "m_stLayoutName");
            String layoutHexString = ((UInt32)GetNonPublicProperty(k, "m_hkl"))
                .ToString("X");

            TimeSpan elapsed = DateTime.UtcNow - loopStartTime;
            Double ticksRemaining = ((Double)elapsed.Ticks * keyboards.Count)
                        / i - elapsed.Ticks;
            TimeSpan remaining = new TimeSpan((Int64)ticksRemaining);
            String msgTimeRemaining = "";
            if (i > 1) {
                // Trim milliseconds
                remaining = new TimeSpan(remaining.Hours, remaining.Minutes,
                        remaining.Seconds);
                msgTimeRemaining = String.Format(", about {0} remaining",
                        remaining);
            }
            System.Console.WriteLine(
                    "Saving {0} {1}, keyboard {2} of {3}{4}",
                    layoutHexString, name, i, keyboards.Count,
                    msgTimeRemaining);

            SaveKeyboard(name, layoutHexString);

        }

        System.Console.WriteLine("{0} elapsed", DateTime.UtcNow - startTime);

    }

    private void SaveKeyboard(String name, String layoutHexString) {
        Object k = keyboardType.GetConstructors(
                BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic)[0]
            .Invoke(new Object[] {
                        new String[] {"", layoutHexString},
                    false});

        SetNonPublicField(k, "m_fSeenOrHeardAboutPropertiesDialog", true);
        SetNonPublicField(k, "m_stKeyboardTextFileName",
                String.Format("{0}\\{1} {2}.klc",
                    baseDirectory, layoutHexString, name));
        InvokeNonPublicInstanceMethod(k, "mnuFileSave_Click",
                new Object[] {new Object(), new EventArgs()});

        ((IDisposable)k).Dispose();
    }

}

Basically, it gets a list of all the keyboards on the system, then for each one, loads it in MSKLC, sets the "Save As" filename, lies about whether it's already configured the custom keyboard properties, and then simulates a click on the File -> Save menu item.