Windows 8.1 Handling Physical Keyboard Input

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I'm developing a Universal App in c# for Windows 8.1

I'm trying to catch physical keyboard input and from the on-line literature have been pointed to KeyDown event and KeyRoutedEventArgs and the Key property. This works fine for most key characters and returns VirtualKey enumerations such as VirtualKey.A. However, when characters such as ,.;:> are pressed the Key property is set to a number and this number is the same value if the key is pressed in combination with VirtualKey.Shift which seems to indicate it is not representative of the characters on the key, but only represents the physical key.

As it happens, I'm using an Italian laptop keyboard which of course is laid out differently to a UK Extended keyboard so the Key value for a semicolon (;) is 186 on a UK keyboard (as an un-Shifted or bottom character) and is 188 on an Italian keyboard (as a Shift or top character). I'm therefore stumped as far a capturing these punctuation characters.

I have developed WPF, Silverlight and .Net app in the past and don't remember it being as difficult to handle physical keyboard input even in combination a game loop, as I just used the Key or Keys enumeration and an OEM value.

How can I capture these punctuation characters when their respective key is pressed, irrespective of the keyboard layout?