using Visual Studio 2010 and speech recognition on windows 7?

Question

I've never used Speech Recognition (SR) at all, but I'm hearing that the built-in SR capabilities of windows 7 is not half-bad. I'm thinking that it might be a real productivity booster with Visual Studio so I can decrease the use of the mouse (no Emacs comments please ;-). I don't envision not using the keyboard to type the actual code--but maybe that would work too?

Does anyone have experience using SR with Visual Studio on Windows 7? If so, any tips on usage?

Answer 1

Windows Speech Recognition uses UI Automation (or MSAA when UI Automation isn't available) to interact with applications. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2008 and below had a very odd implementation of MSAA that made it impossible to use Windows Speech Recognition with Visual Studio 2008.

Therefore, by default, devenv.exe is listed as a 'blocked' executable.

If you want to try Visual Studio 2010 with Windows Speech Recognition, you could unblock devenv.exe by going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Speech\Preferences\AppCompatDisableMSAA

in regedit and removing the value named 'devenv.exe'.

I haven't tried VS 2010 with Windows Speech Recognition, so you're on your own.