Integrating Office XP Smart Tags with the .NET XML Web Services

In May 2001, Microsoft announced the Office XP suite and introduced the concept of Smart Tags. This technology provides the dynamic recognition of text or data within a document and allows the association of various actions with the text. In this article, Darshan Singh looks at how we can build a smart tag handler DLL in Visual Basic 6.0 that uses the .NET web service to get the data. The smart tag handler discussed here allows travel agents to get their corporate clients' travel details as soon as the clients' identification numbers are entered in Excel 2002. The smart tag handler recognizes the corporate client ID, sends a request to .NET web service that returns the travel details in XML format, and the smart tag handler processes the returned XML using Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 4.0 and fills the information into an Excel sheet.