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Why you need to actually test instead of just looking at the source code

In a previous post , I mentioned that you need to set the GUID_PROP_COMPOSING property across text in a composition, or else Windows XP will terminate the composition. That’s true. I then provided a code snippet to set that property. That snippet is wrong. Read More...
Posted Friday, May 15, 2009 11:43 AM by Eric Brown | 1 Comments
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Where are the TSF Samples?

Many people have emailed me asking about the TSF samples on MSDN.  They’re supposed to be on MSDN code gallery, although they don’t appear to be there. They are, however, part of the Windows SDK . After installation, you'll find them in %programfiles%\Microsoft Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008 1:57 PM by Eric Brown | 1 Comments

Categories

In an earlier post on keyboards , I talked briefly about text service categories.  I'd like to talk more about categories. TSF will make sure that at most one text service in any category is enabled at any given time. So, for example, you can enable Read More...
Posted Friday, March 14, 2008 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments
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Visual Studio 2008 issues

If you're building a text service DLL, you almost certainly don't want to use Visual Studio 2008's compiler.  The problem is that Visual Studio 2008 uses a new C Runtime Library, and if you build your text service with Visual Studio, your text service Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 17, 2008 2:52 PM by Eric Brown | 5 Comments
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Things the Documentation left out, part N

I recently had two people ask me the same question: "Why can't I insert more than one character into a composition on Notepad?" It's actually a bit more complicated than that, since this behavior only appears to happen on Windows XP with a US English Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 22, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 1 Comments

ITfCompartmentEventSink::OnChange means what it says...

I got caught by this recently. ITfCompartmentEventSink::OnChange means what it says. If you repeatedly store the same value into a global compartment, the event sinks will not fire. If you store a different value into the compartment, the event sinks Read More...
Posted Monday, November 05, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments
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Compartment Values

I've been working with compartments recently, and I've run across a few 'features' that tripped me up. I figure if I've run across them, others have too. Although MSDN says that you can put integers, BSTRs, and interface pointers into a compartment, you Read More...
Posted Friday, November 02, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 1 Comments
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The usual path

Text Services Framework assumes that your text service follows a particular processing path. If your text service doesn't conform to these assumptions, then your programming job will be more complicated. (Not impossible, just more complex.) The text service Read More...
Posted Monday, October 08, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments
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What to do when you push a key

I received an interesting email the other day asking about how to get the character code from the parameters passed to the ITfKeyEventSink::OnKeyDown method. The answer is that most keyboard related text services only work with a particular keyboard layout, Read More...
Posted Friday, October 05, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments
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Input Scopes

Another useful, but underutilized, group of functions in TSF are those relating to Input Scopes. Input Scopes allow an application to define the sorts of things that are expected in this document (edit control, etc.). For example, the Internet Explorer Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments

Fun with Contexts

One interface that I hadn't paid much attention to in TSF is ITfContextKeyEventSink . What does this let you do? Why, it lets you inspect keyboard input for a particular context (or document). This lets you do some really fun things, like redirect keyboard Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 27, 2007 4:08 PM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments
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Debugging a Text Service (and Visual Studio problems)

I've received a few emails asking about debugging Text Services. I figured if two people actually went to the trouble of sending an email, that there's enough demand for a post. But first, a little diversion: It turns out that Visual Studio 2005 SP1 ships Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 19, 2007 11:09 AM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments
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What's a Keyboard?

The Text Services Framework makes a number of assumptions when you register your text service as a keyboard text service (i.e., your text service calls RegisterCategory(<clsid of your text service>, GUID_TFCAT_TIP_KEYBOARD, <clsid of your text Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 1 Comments
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Generating Candidates from a Text Service

So how do you create the candidates from within the text service? Well, the first thing you need is the original input, and you need to know what text was created from the original input. Almost all text services (there might be a few that don't do this) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments
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Generating Candidates from an Application

Kirby left a comment to my post on candidates asking when a text service should create an ITfCandidateList. The answer is that when the text service wants to show candidates (via a preserved key or other mechanism), it should show its modal UI, and quite Read More...
Posted Friday, May 25, 2007 11:43 AM by Eric Brown | 0 Comments
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