Archives

Archives / 2007 / February
  • 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...