VoiceXML with Visual Studio
Every so often I'm surprised by the incredible flexibility built into Visual Studio 2005.
I've been writing a lot of VoiceXML lately and I was really missing the intellisense that I've become so used to. On a whim I tried opening a VoiceXML document in Visual Studio and much to my surprise it worked!
It turns out that Visual Studio is capable of understanding the syntax of a document based on it's DOCTYPE. In my case it saw <!DOCTYPE vxml PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD VOICEXML 2.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml21/vxml.dtd"> and was able to automatically give me basic intellisense and syntax checking for VoiceXML version 2.1.
As an example, create a new XML document and insert the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE vxml PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD VOICEXML 2.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml21/vxml.dtd">
<vxml version="2.1">
</vxml>
You'll notice that the last element (</vxml>) gives you a warning. Hovering over it tells you not only that your missing an element but what the valid elements might be!
This is all very cool if you ask me...