The Limitations of WP7 Copy and Paste Confirmed

Chris Walshie (of the Chevron Team) has given some more insight into the WP7 update that we’re all waiting for. We’ve noted some concerns about copy and paste for third party apps and it turns out that third party apps can use copy and paste if there is a textbox present.

The biggest one being, copy and paste is ONLY supported on the textbox control in 3rd party apps.  When I say supported, I’m talking about the OS automagically recognizing the input control and giving the user the fancy text selection picker with a “copy” button.

One issue I have noticed though is certain apps don’t actually use the textbox to render read-only text.  For example, the Twitter for Windows Phone app, when you’ve clicked on a tweet to either view it or click on a link, the text isn’t rendered in a TextBox control.  Unfortunately you’re not going to get copy & paste there. The simple fix is to change to a textbox control for scenarios where a user might need to copy some text into the clipboard but it requires some effort from application developers.

So there you have it. Essentially we’re all going to figure out where it works and where it doesn’t work in third party apps but it is not going to work everywhere.

By the way he also confirms that the speed boosts are real and it’s not just in launching game titles, as other apps, like Facebook and Twitter, are noted to be launching faster.