TSF Aware

And now for something completely unrelated to TSF, or dictation: I'm going to pile onto the incredibly funny Star Trek/ lolcat spoof at granades.com. If you haven't seen it yet, it's pretty darn funny.

These interfaces manage the language bar and the items that display on the language bar. These interfaces are used exclusively by text services, and will be discussed further in a future post. Interface How to Obtain ITfLangBarMgr...

The next set of TSF manager interfaces are the enumerators. These are rather boring interfaces; they just enumerate things. Generally speaking, the enumerators enumerate things owned by the item that provides the enumerator. For example, IEnumTfContexts...

The interfaces in this category allow you to be called back when certain events happen on another interface. These callbacks are generally referred to as 'event sinks'. Interface How to Obtain ITfSource QI on...

Our next stop on our tour through TSF brings us to the two most heavily used interfaces in text services: Contexts and Ranges. But first, a quick diversion to discuss the relationship between threads, documents, and contexts. The ITfThreadMgr object...

The next stop on the tour is an extended visit through the TSF manager interfaces. Since TSF implements a lot of interfaces, I decided to break them up into separate posts. I've also included a (very brief) description of how a text service (or application...

The first stop on the TSF tour is the application interfaces. These are implemented by applications or text controls. An application (or text control) must implement ITextStoreACP to be considered ‘TSF-aware'. It may choose to implement any of the...

The Text Services Framework consists of over 100 interfaces. MSDN does a pretty good job describing what each interface implements, and who should implement it, but it doesn’t do a great job of showing how all the interfaces fit together. I've composed...

What are Transitory Contexts? Transitory contexts are contexts managed by the TSF manager for applications that aren't TSF-Aware. They allow text services to operate in any application. However, there are substantial differences between Transitory contexts...

There is so much to write about TSF that I'm not really sure where to start. Some possibilities are: A guided tour through TSF, grouping the interfaces into categories, and explaining who implements them, and where they're typically implemented...

Dan asked whether someone could write a text service in managed code. While I suspect that doing so is possible (but difficult), it is certainly not desirable . Text services get loaded into arbitrary processes, so they need to be small and lightweight...

Welcome to my new blog! I'm Eric Brown, and I'm a developer in the Windows User Experience team. I'm responsible for making dictation work in Windows Speech Recognition. Dictation relies on the Text Services Framework to make things work, so I know...