To know whether a COM component supports STA, MTA, or both threading models, you can check the registry value ThreadingModel on HKCR\CLSID\\InprocServer32. Another way to set the threading model is the instance (opposite of static) method. If neither STAThreadAttribute nor MTAThreadAttribute attributes has not been set, the threading model by default is MTA. Conversely, MTA (Multi-Threaded Apartment) threading model means that the COM component supports and can be accessed by multiple threads. To enable STA for your application you need to adorn the Main() function with the STAThreadAttribute attribute. Means, that the COM component supports -and bounds- only to a single thread. Figure 3 shows the Choose Toolbox Items dialog in the COM Components tab.ĪgentCtl uses STA (Single-Threaded Apartment) threading model.
MS AGENT 2.0 WINDOWS
To use Microsoft Agent in our Windows Forms application, simply, we'll start by adding the Microsoft Agent Control to our toolbox. Conversely, CCWs are COM components act as the bridge between COM and. NET assemblies act as the bridge between. NET and COM cannot call each other directly, two types of wrapper components exist in the space, RCWs (Runtime-Callable Wrappers) and CCWs (COM-Callable Wrappers). Therefore, we used the AxImp.exe.īecause. You might be wandering why we haven't used the TlbImp.exe tool? Because this is an ActiveX COM component contains ActiveX controls. Another way is to use the AxImp.exe tool that comes with the. This is done automatically while adding the ActiveX component control to your toolbox in Visual Studio. You need to create a RCW (Runtime-Callable Wrapper) component (assembly) that will act as a bridge between. Microsoft Agent Windows Forms Supportīecause AgentCtl.dll is an ActiveX component you cannot use it directly in your code. This component -and many others- resides on %windir\%MSAgent. It contains the Microsoft Agent Control that's the door for Microsoft Agent Windows Forms programming. The most component that we are interested in is the ActiveX COM library AgentCtl.dll that contains the Microsoft Agent support features for Windows Forms. After downloading and installing the Microsoft Agent SDK, you may notice that Microsoft Agent SDK offers you many components for many purposes. Remember to inculde them as prerequisites in your application installer package.
MS AGENT 2.0 INSTALL
Take into consideration that, for the application to run correctly on user's machine, the user need to install two packages, Microsoft Agent and Microsoft TTS.
MS AGENT 2.0 DOWNLOAD
If you need to create your own characters you can download the Agent Character Editor and start using character creation. In addition, you are not end up using characters created for you. It is worth mentioning that, if you need to extend speech feature of Microsoft Agent to support other languages other than English, you need to download your preferred language package from the Speech SDK page. The Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine is used to translate text into voice. These packages are available in the Speech SDK in this page. In addition, you need to download the Speech API and Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine in order to enable the speech feature of Microsoft Agent. It's available for downloadalong with its documentation in the Microsoft Agent SDK download page on Microsoft. But, in order to start programming you need to download the Microsoft Agent SDK. Programming Microsoft Agent is very easy. Visit Microsoft Agent Ring and download plenty of characters. In addition, Office 2003 comes with many characters including Clippit. Though, Merlin is included by default in Windows. There're plenty of characters available for download. There are a limitless number of roles and functions that developers can create for these personalities to perform. Enhancing applications and Web pages with a visible interactive personality will both broaden and humanize the interaction between users and their computers. Microsoft Agent empowers developers to extend the user interface beyond the conventional mouse and keyboard interactions prevalent today. These characters can speak, via a Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine or recorded audio, and even accept spoken voice commands.
MS AGENT 2.0 SOFTWARE
It is a set of software services that enable developers to incorporate interactive animated characters into their applications and Web pages. Microsoft Agent is a technology that provides a foundation for more natural ways for people to communicate with their computers. It provides powerful animation capability, interactivity, and versatility, with incredible ease of development. Microsoft Agent is an unprecedented technology to create innovative, new conversational interfaces for applications and Web pages.