Sunday, Jun 27, 1999, 5:08 PM
Windows Telephony Programming: A Developer's Guide to TAPI
The Book
This page is dedicated to my book, Windows Telephony Programming: A Developer's Guide to TAPI, from Addison-Wesley. If you'd like to order a copy, you can do so from Amazon.com.
The Table of Contents
- Prologue: The Story of Windows Telephony
- Windows Telephony Architecture (excerpted here)
- Assisted Telephony
- Making a Call
- Telephony Framework
- Answering a Call
- Call Management
- Telephony Service Providers
- The Future of Telephony
The Source
After 6 years of keeping the sample code of my Windows Telephony Programming book up to date, I couldn't do it any more. Since I literally haven't written a TAPI program since I shipped the book (although I wrote tons of them for years before that), I'm was just trying to stay ahead of Microsoft's compiler changes, the service packs and the platform SDKs. I'm already two technology waves beyond TAPI and no longer up on the latest in that space.
So, Robert Bamberg is taking over the support of the source code for the book. He does telephony consulting and is maintaining the code for the book on his site. Thanks, Robert!
Hardware/Software Requirements
I built most of the samples under Windows 95. They should work equally well under Windows 98, but none of the audio applications will work under Windows NT (like tMonitor) unless you're using a TSP that supports the audio media mode. Unimodem under NT4 or Win95 doesn't support audio. Unimodem/V, which can be installed on Win95 and comes out of the box on Win98 and NT5/Windows 2000, does support audio applications, assuming you've got compatible hardware. For the book, I used an external Supra Voice Modem. Nothing else would work (and believe me, I tried everything available at the time). However, there's been other modems built since then. If you'd like to take a look at other possible modems, check out http://www.sunny-beach.net/Modems/Modemlist.htm, which lists a set of modems that Sunny Beach tested for the Personal Receptionist product. No guarantees, though, as I haven't compared these modems myself.
FAQ
Two questions come up again and again:
-
Why doesn't my modem work as a voice modem? This is something to take up
with your modem vendor. Ask about TAPI and Unimodem/V support. Please don't ask
me to debug your modem.
-
How do I do fax with TAPI? I haven't done any fax work with TAPI. My
background is integrated voice response (IVR), not modems. The reason the data
modem stuff is in the book is because I like the movie War Games. If
you'd like to do fax with TAPI, check the TAPI FAQs:
Grant Schenck's website: http://members.home.net/grantschenck/Bruce Pennypacker's website: http://tapifaq.pennypacker.org/
Michael Dunn's website: http://members.home.net/tapifaq/tapi.htm
If you have other questions about TAPI that I haven't covered in my book, you should post them to the following newsgroups: microsoft.public.win32.programmer.tapi and microsoft.public.win95.commtelephony.
TAPI Explorer
I built the TAPI Explorer (tExplorer) to allow me to understand the various capabilities of the telephony devices installed on my system when I was developing TAPI applications and writing my TAPI book. It grew into a utility for showing all line, address and phone capabilities as well as other TAPI settings, e.g. country codes, telephony locations, service providers, etc. If you're running into TAPI errors that you don't understand, TAPI Explorer will help you work through them.
This version has been run and tested on Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP and supports TAPI versions 1.4 through 3.1.