Microsoft Office has shipped their context manifests for the Tablet PC Platform today, they are available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=31634d79-34ad-494d-8108-80085ace23be&DisplayLang=en

Contextual Awareness is a key part of the Tablet PC 2005 O/S, it enables applications to hint to the recognizers what the most probable results of the Ink to Text recognition process should be. By “hinting” we can help drive overall accuracy of the recognition process through the roof J thought it was good before wait until you have context support.

It’s a fairly simple process, lets say you are in an app entering data through the system TIP and the field is expecting a zoom percentage between 1% and 200% by telling the TIP the result is a positive numeric integer we can help it in its decision making process for determining the result. I have an article on our dev center that focuses on Context Awareness and explains the different ways and ISV can add it to their applications.

While programmatic control renders the best level of support we have a tool in our V1.7 SDK called the context tagging tool. This tool, styled after spy++, allows you to build an XML (because XML will save the world J) file called a context manifest that identifies the expected type for each edit control in an application. The tool is cool because it allows ISVs to build great support for Tablet without having to break their binaries and/or write any code.

Over the next few months we’ll be adding additional context manifest to our list, most of the MS applications and a large collection of ISV applications. If you’re an ISV and interested in building better support for Tablet with minimal costs let us know and we’ll work with you to help you implement this feature and perhaps add you to the list of applications we plan to expose on our http://www.tabletpc.com website.  Send email to tabisv@microsoft.com with a subject title of “Context Tagging” and we’ll get in touch with you about this feature. It really rocks and it will make your application run beautifully on the Tablet PC.

/frank