Control.KeyDown Event

Key events occur in the following order:

1. KeyDown

2. KeyPress

3. KeyUp

To handle keyboard events only at the form level and not enable other controls to receive keyboard events, set the KeyPressEventArgs.Handled property in your form's KeyPress event-handling method to true. Certain keys, such as the TAB, RETURN, ESC, and arrow keys are handled by controls automatically. To have these keys raise the KeyDown event, you must override the IsInputKey method in each control on your form. The code for the override of the IsInputKey would need to determine if one of the special keys is pressed and return a value of true. Instead of overriding the IsInputKey method, you can handle the PreviewKeyDown event and set the IsInputKey property to true. For a code example, see the PreviewKeyDown event.

For more information about handling events, see Consuming Events.

The following code example uses the KeyDown event to determine the type of character entered into the control.

.NET Framework

.NET Framework Client Profile

Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 7, Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 (Server Core Role not supported), Windows Server 2008 R2 (Server Core Role supported with SP1 or later; Itanium not supported)

The .NET Framework does not support all versions of every platform. For a list of the supported versions, see .NET Framework System Requirements.

Reference

Other Resources