What do you do if your DirectX* desktop game requires keyboard input, but is running on a Windows* 8 platform without a physical keyboard? If your game runs in a window, the user can manually invoke the touch keyboard from the taskbar but that can be unintuitive, and doesn't help at all for full-screen games. You could write a custom keyboard overlay within your game.  That approach can be harder than it seems at first blush, with lots of corner cases to verify with language support, modifier keys, and event handlers to write and debug. 

 On May 10th in New York City Intel and Microsoft hosted an App Lab for local software developers working on applications for the Financial Services industry. For this event at the New York Microsoft Technology centerWe had a standing room only audience representing many major financial services companies – I was able to kick off the training sessions with an Intel Platform overview and some general information on Windows 8.

It is only a few weeks until you will get a chance to get your hands on the 4th Generation Intel® Core&tm; Processor Family formerly code-named Haswell. This architecture will come with some very nice features including Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (Intel® AVX2). Most notably, Intel®