Life in the real world

Sometimes things are not as easy as we would like them to be. This is the case with the international keyboard support that we have been working on. After getting it all working here, I sent it out to a customer that has a great interest in this feature and by the next day, I had the bad news.

It works in some cases, but not all.

So it was back to the drawing board to determine what is going on. It turns out that while HighTest would play back one international key that was generated with the AltGr key, if we tried to send more than one with the same Keys() command, the first one was the only one to be played back. A trip into message loop with Spyxx told us what was going on. For some reason, after we play back a key that is modified by Ctrl and Alt, the Alt key gets turned off - resulting in the remaining keys not having the correct modifier keys associated with them. I searched the MS documentation for a reason for this behavior, but as expected, they appear to be mute on the subject.

But if there's a will, there's a way and with a little restructuring of the code, we now send out the modifier keys for each keypress. It's more work, but it does solve the problem and we were back in business.

So we're now in a position to really have you try out HighTest with your non-US keyboard. If you are interested, email support and ask to try out the new keyboard support. Note that you must have a licensed copy of HighTest 5.5 in order to participate.

Until next time...

Rich.