Scott Hanselman

NOTE: If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the BabySmash category. Also check out http://windowsclient.net/ for more developer info on WPF.

BACKGROUND: This is one of a series of posts on learning WPF. I wrote an application for my 2 year old using WPF, but as I'm a Win32-minded programmer, my working app is full of Win32-isms. It's not a good example of a WPF application even though it uses the technology. I'm calling on community (that's you, Dear Reader) to blog about your solutions to different (horrible) selections of my code. You can get the code http://www.codeplex.com/babysmash. Post your solutions on your blog, in the comments, or in the Issue Tracker and we'll all learn WPF together. Pick a single line, a section, or subsystem or the whole app!

There's been a flood of interesting content coming in around BabySmash, including WPF Expert Karl Shifflett who found the original code so nasty that he rewrote it from scratch! I'll do a whole post analyzing his code and how I can refactor my own.

Before that, I wanted to share one little tidbit that isn't explicit to WPF but rather to the .NET Framework 3.0. Most folks think of .NET 3.0 (myself included) as being WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and WF (Windows Workflow). However, there's a bunch of miscellaneous goodness in in .NET 3.0 that I always forget about.

In BabySmash I wanted to have the letters and shapes spoken when they appear on the screen, and lazily, rather than recording the sounds, I thought to myself, "self, why not text to speech?"

I know there's TTS (Text to Speech) stuff in Windows as COM Objects, so I went into Add Reference in Visual Studio, found the component and added it. A .NET wrapper got created that makes the COM object look like .NET and off I went.

Turns out that .NET 3.0 includes System.Speech, an official component that does all this for me. I yanked out the COM stuff and put System.Speech in, and got the added benefit of a Cancel method to stop any current speech. This is particularly helpful for BabySmash because when kids hit the keyboard fast the speech system slowed down as words to say queued up. It couldn't say the words as fast as they were said.

objSpeech = new SpeechSynthesizer();
objSpeech.SpeakAsyncCancelAll();
objSpeech.Rate = -1;
objSpeech.Volume = 100;
objSpeech.SpeakAsync(s);

//REMOVED COM STUFF
//objSpeech.WaitUntilDone(Timeout.Infinite);
//objSpeech.Speak(s, SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFlagsAsync);

Additionally, by using the COM Component, I got into trouble where Vista has version 5.3 and XP had version 5.0. This made it difficult for developers using XP to build the program. This goes away when using the .NET assembly.

Hopefully I'll get to do more "refactoring via subtraction" as I dig deeper into .NET 3.x.

Also, thanks to Gina at LifeHacker for her post on BabySmash! The comments are pretty good, but the best interaction was these two comments:

"Wow, 15 years of progress with Windows and this is all we have to show for it? No wonder Windows is teh suckage."

Very supportive! ;) And a response from another random commenter:

"Wow, I've seen people take cheap shots at Windows, but this is the winner! A dad who writes a program for his son suddenly contributing to windows being 'teh suckage' ..."

Bam. Baby! Smash!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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