Creating a Simple Text to Speech App - Page 1
       by kirupa  |  20 August 2007

In the previous page, you finished working on the interface. The interface is only a part of an application. The other part is the application logic, and this page will get you started towards adding the code needed to make your great-looking actually do something useful!

Adding Our Application Logic
The application logic is the code that makes your application actually do something. So far, you've primarily focused on the user interface side of things. With the application logic, we delve into Visual Studio and C# with a dash of Blend here and there for building bridges between the designer and developer realms.

Binding an Event to an Event Handler
What we want to do is have our application read aloud the text you input into the textbox. That will be accomplished by you clicking on the Speak button. To do that, we need to add an event handler that does something when your Speak button is clicked.

In Blend, select your Speak button. From the Properties pane, to the right of your Name field and Properties button, you'll find the Events button:

[ click on the Events button to access tie events to event handlers ]

Click on the Events button to display a list of events your selected button supports. The first event listed should be the Click event:

[ the event we are interested in is the Click event ]

Click on the textfield to the right of the Click event to specify the name of your event handler. Give your event handler the name Speak:

[ in the Click event's textfield, enter the world Speak ]

Once you have given your event handler the name Speak, press Enter. After a brief second of what seems like frantic computer activity, Visual Studio / Express will launch. You may receive a security warning, and if you do, select the Load project normally option:

[ if prompted about opening a project created externally, choose the Load project normally option ]

The end result in most cases will be that you will see the event handler code snippet displayed for you in Visual Studio or Visual C# Express:

[ the Speak event handler has automatically been created for us ]

Great! In this section you bound an event to an event handler. To learn more about what that means, read my Event Handlers in WPF tutorial. To look at the end result, when somebody clicks on your Speak button, the Speak method (what you see in Visual Studio) will be called. Let's now proceed to the next page and look at how to make our Speak method actually say something out loud.

Onwards to the next page!

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