Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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Today Microsoft released an app I wrote, Dictionary Tool for Tablet PC. You can get it from the Tablet PC PowerToys website.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/downloads/powertoys.asp
Background
I wrote this app because I was frustrated that the Tablet Recognizer (which is actually the speech recognizer), did a poor job with many words that I write. Working at Microsoft involves lots of jargon, TLAs and so on that the Tablet doesn't get right all the time. I was also frustrated at how difficult it was to add words to the recognizer. I was also frustrated that you couldn't import the Microsoft Office dictionary into the Tablet Recognizer. Finally, I added the ability to import an arbitrary text file via the GUI or a command line allowing you to batch import words. This app also supports adding and removing words in your native OS Language. If you select a word in the listbox it will display a tooltip showing you the language of said word.
So, I wrote a little app in Visual Basic.NET. I had never written a VB.NET app before and had a great time writing this program. I think that it demonstrated the power that the Microsoft .NET programming environment actually offers. Later on I learned C# and ported the app over (the shipping version still uses VB.NET).
This app also makes use of the Tablet PC SDK 1.5. If you click in the Edit Text box with the Pen on your tablet you will get a little Pen Input Panel letting you easily add words when in Pen mode.
Troubleshooting
Having said all this, some people have been reporting problems using the app. Much of this is covered in this thread on Tablet PC Buzz.
Many of the problems are likely related to the Dictionary file. I'm not sure what the cause of these problems are, and it's pretty hard for me to troubleshoot some of them.
So if you are having problems, one thing to try is moving your tablet dictionary file. it is located here:
%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Speech\Files\UserLexicons
If you got to Start->Run and enter the path above you will be in a folder that should have one file. Move that file to the desktop, and then re-launch the Dictionary Tool and add a word to the dictionary.