We take spell-checking for granted in most applications today. Microsoft Word, Outlook, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and even HTML/Text editors on web design tools have built-in spell-checking and syntax error highlighting capabilities. Wouldn't it be nice if your application did it too?
The question is: can you and how? There are many third party components out there that can add spell-checking to your controls, but will they work with Gupta/Unify Team Developer? We don't know and leave it to you (if you are still using SAL) to find out.
If you have moved to C#/VB.NET using our automated migration solution and are now deploying your apps together with the PPJ Framework, we have just made available a development build and source code of a simple and yet powerful spell-checking and syntax highlighting component.
You can find it in our downloads section.
The solution that we are going to use in the PPJ Framework 2011 release uses the popular hunspell open-source library. It's compiled for 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Hunspell is the spell checker for OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Mac OSX, Opera, and soon it will be yours too!
Free dictionaries for virtually every language in the world can be downloaded at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries. Here you will find OXT files that are in fact ZIP archives. Change the extension to ZIP and extract the two .aff and .dic file for the language you have downloaded.
Our implementation is capable of hooking up any WinForms TextBoxBase control, including RichEdit, editable ComboBox controls and grid cells in edit mode. We support three styles for drawing the syntax error underline: Solid, Dotted and ZigZagged. We also support default and custom context menu with words suggestions. Additionally we expose a utility SpellChecker class with several methods that allow developers to use the dictionaries directly.
This is one of the many things you can do once you Join the Evolution. Migrating to TD 6 and ultimately remain with TD and SAL simply doesn't make sense when you cannot use all the modern features in C#, .NET and Visual Studio.