New Smart Tag Toolkit Available for Developers on MSDN

Yesterday John Durant announced the availability of a new Office 2003 Smart Tag Developers Toolkit. I was involved with the toolkit and already know from the beta process that the toolkit is immensily useful. This toolkit should also be of special interest to all the new IBF programmers out there.

For example, one of my collegues spent about 2 hours troubleshooting a smart tag he was developing in C#. Basically everything looked OK but the smart tag would instantly shutdown after Microsoft Word loaded it for no apparent reason. After he installed the beta of the Office 2003 Smart Tag Developers Toolkit he found the problem and corrected it in a matter of minutes. What was the problem? He wasn't returning a value from the Recognizers Name property and this forces Word to shut down. The tool not only showed that the name was missing but even flagged it as an issue. This is an example of a obvious problem that has humbled many smart tag developers.

What Do You Get in the Toolkit?
The toolkit contains the Smart Tag Explorer and Smart Tag Recognize Tester. This set of utilities is intended to aid the smart tag developer in quickly building efficient, stable, and robust smart tags for a variety of applications. 

Smart Tag Explorer
The Smart Tag Explorer provides you with a visual interface for browsing information related to smart tags on your development workstation and on targeted platforms within your enterprise.

You can use this information during the smart tag development process to verify that smart tags are reporting accurate information to the host application. Also, you can examine smart tags included with Microsoft Office 2003 Editions to discover how they work, providing an example as they design their own smart tags.

Recognize Tester
Loading and unloading a host application constantly during the smart tag development process can be time-consuming. The Recognize Tester simplifies this challenge by allowing the smart tag developer to test the Recognize and Recognize2 method under development without the need of a host application being loaded. This can reduce the time and complexity of smart tag development.

OfficeZealot.com gives this toolkit a thumbs up and recommends it to all smart tag developers.