How to create a Smart Tag DLL in Visual Basic?

[warehouse peon]

Hello friends,
I have done many programs in Visual Basic. But still i am getting problem while creating the DLL in Visual Basic. Last time you all guys helped me a lot, so I thought that this time also you can help me.!! Now I am stuck while making the Smart Tag DLL. I want to create this so that I can use it in Office XP. Please tell me how to create a Smart Tag DLL in Visual Basic? Thanks in Advance.!!

[Warner]

Every text-based communication contains letters, numbers, and symbols, but the real power of communication comes within its context. Smart Tags are a technology introduced with Office XP that provide Office users more interactivity with the content of their Office documents. The new smart tags feature in Microsoft Office XP is a powerful tool for adding this context to your Office documents, or build new contexts of your own. A Smart Tag is an element of text in an Office document that is recognized as having custom actions associated with it.

[MindSpace]

You can extend the capabilities of Office XP by developing your own Smart Tag Recognizer/Action dynamic-link library (DLL) for use in Office documents. You can create a smart tag recognizer by using Extensible Markup Language (XML) in association with the smart tag XML list schema, or by using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) inside a Web page. But according to me these solutions aren't very extensible. Excel 2002 and Word 2002 are the only Office XP applications that support Smart Tags. However, you can apply the information that is presented in this article to Smart Tag development for any application that adopts the Smart Tag technology.

[opaper]

If you want to automate programmatic access to smart tags, your best choice is to create a dynamic-link library (DLL). A Smart Tag DLL is a standard Component Object Model (COM) DLL that implements two special interfaces: ISmartTagRecognizer and ISmartTagAction. To develop a smart tag DLL, in addition to Office XP, you will need a Component Object Model (COM) development system such as Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Professional Edition or later because the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications development environment in Office does not provide the ability to create DLLs. To create smart tags, Office XP provides the Microsoft Smart Tags 1.0 type library, which consists of a collection of properties and methods grouped into interfaces.

[Reegan]

As mentioned earlier, two main interfaces in the Microsoft Smart Tags 1.0 type library are the ISmartTagRecognizer interface, which recognizes character strings as smart-tag actionable by marking recognized strings with a dotted purple underline and displaying the Smart Tag Actions button, and the ISmartTagAction interface, which both provides a list of actions when the Smart Tag Actions button is clicked and carries out the selected action from the list. Once you develop your first smart tag DLL, then you will have to create a DLL project. You will have to use Visual Basic 6.0 for creating this DLL.

[kyosang]

To create and set up the DLL project, you should follow the steps given below :

1. Double-click on ActiveX DLL, presented in the New Project dialog box.
2. Then click Project1 Properties on the Project menu.
3. In the Project Name box, type MicrosoftWebSite. Then click OK.
4. In the Properties window, in the (Name) box, type over Class1 and change it to SmartTagRecognizer.
5. Then click References, which will be in the Project menu.
6. Then select Microsoft Smart Tags 1.0 Type Library, and then click OK.
7. In the Properties window, in the (Name) box, type over Class1 and change it to SmartTagAction.
8. On the Project menu, click MicrosoftWebSite Properties. On the Component tab, click Project Compatibility. Then click OK.