Spell check as an OS service
As Operating systems are maturing different features are finding its way into it. So much so that many software are totally becoming redundant as there USP is already a core OS feature.
Recently I needed to include some spell-checking in a software that I was writing. I used interop in MS Office (Word in particular) to get this done. Since spell checking is so widely used I do think they should now become part of Windows. It'd be great if the context menu of text boxes have some think like "Check spelling" along with Cut/Copy/Paste.
The issue is not that things like spell checking is hard to do. The issue is including new dependencies. Now I have a 30 line code that uses Word for spell checking but can I rely on MS Word being installed on all machines where the software will be deployed? This is where OS support comes into play. Someone even suggested using Web-services to get this done!!! That is simply not feasible both from perf as well as security reasons...
The code I used goes as follows....
using
System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;
using System.Reflection;
namespace SomeNameSpace
{
class SpellCheck : IDisposable
{
private ApplicationClass m_winword;
public SpellCheck()
{
m_winword = new ApplicationClass();
}
public void Dispose()
{
object savenochanges = WdSaveOptions.wdDoNotSaveChanges;
object nothing = Missing.Value;
if (m_winword != null)
m_winword.Quit(ref savenochanges, ref nothing,
ref nothing);
m_winword = null;
}
public bool IsCorrect(string word)
{
object nothing = Missing.Value;
return m_winword.CheckSpelling(word,
ref nothing, ref nothing,
ref nothing, ref nothing,
ref nothing, ref nothing,
ref nothing, ref nothing,
ref nothing, ref nothing,
ref nothing, ref nothing);
}
}
}
This can be used as in
SpellCheck
spellCheck = new SpellCheck();
if(!spellCheck.IsCorrect(someWord))
// not correct message
