Speech SDK
So I decided to write a plug-in for Visual Studio doing some things with voice recognition (details coming later if I can find enough time to work on it) and went to check out the Speech Applicaton SDK 1.0. Turns out that is for developing Telephony and ASP.NET applications. The thing that I need to use is the Speech SDK 5.1. This SDK is all COM, btw, and has no managed interfaces.
First off, what the heck is up with that? Why are there no managed classes for working with speech “stuff” in Windows applications. To me that's an indicator of either “it's not ready for the big time yet” or “our audience doesn't care about managed code” or “we haven't had time to create a managed version yet”. I may be way off on this, but since living in the world of .NET since RTM, I really don't enjoy doing anything that's not managed.
The other thing about this is why are there two SDK's (other than the obvious that one is managed and one's not)? The answer I got from the newsgroups was along the line of “two products for two different needs”. Again, I'm brand new to anything related to speech, but that seems kind of silly to me. It would like saying it would be a better idea to have a WindowsForms SDK and an ASP.NET SDK instead of just the .NET SDK.
Anywho...enough bitching...it's time to get to it! :) Maybe I'll post another beginners guide like I did for .NET CF once I've used it a bit and get some observations.