How to globally catch PointerMoved events in Uno 6?

[HakanL]

I used to have this code in my Uno 5.6 start up code to capture pointer movements (it's to turn on the backlight of a screen on a RPi device) and it worked fine:

var coreWindow = CoreWindow.GetForCurrentThread();
coreWindow.PointerMoved += (s, e) =>
{
    // Turn on backlight
};

With Uno 6 coreWindow is not null, but the events are never fired. I tried with Window.Current.Content which has the events, and they are fired on regular content, but I need these fired on dialogs as well, which it won't. Any suggestions on how to globally capture PointerMoved? This is for Skia Desktop on Linux (but I can reproduce on Windows).

[MartinZikmund]

@HakanL unfortunately this API is no longer available in WinUI and because of multi-window handling we had to follow suit. Are you aware of a replacement in WinUI that would provide the same functionality? If yes, we can add it too. Alternatively we can add Uno-specific API

[dr1rrb]

Searched earlier this morning for that. Unfortunately it seems that the WinUI team didn't provided any alternative.

The only workaround I can see would be to:

1. Subscribe to the events on Window.Current.Content
2. Pull the VisualTreeHelper.GetOpenPopups and subscribe to events on each popup ...

But as anyway we are still providing a CoreWindow (while it should be null in WinUI), I will make sure that we raising events on it.

[HakanL]

Yeah, I get the events on Window.Current.Content, but as you probably alluded to, that doesn't include dialogs. I need to find a place where I can subscribe to new dialogs opening (so I can call VisualTreeHelper.GetOpenPopups), it'll be a hack, but probably doable. Having the events in CoreWindow would be the best for me (and on WinUI I don't really care about the events because I don't have to manually control the backlight of the screen in Windows). But I speak just from my perspective and use case.

[HakanL]

I hacked together a combination of Windows.Current.Content and VisualTreeHelper.GetOpenPopups. It works, but it would've been much slicker to have CoreWindow working. I also noticed that the KeyDown on CoreWindow doesn't work either, I used that as well.

[dr1rrb]

Actually found that there is a deeper issue that cause both pointer and keyboard events to not be raised properly. Creating a proper issue for this.

[HakanL]

I can confirm that this works now in Uno.Sdk 6.1.0-dev.179 using CoreWindow.