Introduction
I recently had the idea to create a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that will provide grammar checks in addition to the built-in spell checks. As I’ve showed before, creating plug-ins for Windows Live Writer is easy, the problem was to get the code for doing the grammar checking. I’ve found this wonderful site named “After the Deadline” that provides a web based API for both grammar and spell checking, free for non-commercial use!
The site also provides several wrapper libraries for using these APIs. Unfortunately, C# (or any other .NET language) is not among them. Until now.
I present you a C# wrapper library for easily using the “After the Deadline” APIs from any .NET application. I’ve uploaded the C# wrapper to CodePlex and I’ll try to publish it on the official AtD site too.
Features
- Check both grammar and spelling of a given document
- Check only grammar of a given document (faster)
- Get extra information (in HTML format) about specific errors
- Get general statistics on a given document
APIs
These previously mentioned features are exposed by the following simple interface:
public static void InitService(string applicationKey, string userKey);
public static IEnumerable<Error> CheckDocument(string data);
public static IEnumerable<Error> CheckGrammar(string data);
public static string Info(string text);
public static IEnumerable<Metric> Stats(string data);
The InitService
method just sets an application key and user key you should generate according to these instructions.
The most useful method is CheckDocument
which accepts the text to check and returns a collection of error objects.
Since this is simply a wrapper around the original REST API, I strongly suggest you check out the original API documentation to get more details about the parameters and return values.
Can You Provide Some Details About the Implementation?
Sure. The API which is exposed by “After the Deadline” site is based on REST and XML responses.
I simply use WebClient
’s DownloadString
method to get access to the REST interface and then parse the XML using LINQ to XML. Nice and easy.
What's Next?
In my next post, I'll show you a cool implementation of a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that uses this library to provide grammar checking.
That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.
Arik Poznanski is a senior software developer at Verint. He completed two B.Sc. degrees in Mathematics & Computer Science, summa cum laude, from the Technion in Israel.
Arik has extensive knowledge and experience in many Microsoft technologies, including .NET with C#, WPF, Silverlight, WinForms, Interop, COM/ATL programming, C++ Win32 programming and reverse engineering (assembly, IL).