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