HighTest 6.0 Beta 1 now available

At long last, Vermont HighTest Plus 6.0 Beta 1 is available for testing. If you are an existing customer, you may request the beta by emailing support with your serial number or license ID.

Features included in this release include:

• External DLL function support
• Visual File Compare
• Arrays
  
• Random Number Generation
• International Keyboard Support
• Windows Vista Compatibility

The manual is updated with all the new features to assist you in getting up to speed with the new features as fast as possible.

We will be working to create some example scripts in the coming days to assist you in using the new features.

Time is limited to get into this program. Contact us as soon as possible!

Rich.

Vista Alpha Release soon available

It has been a long time coming, but we finally have a Vista-compatible version of HighTest for you to try out. It has received limited testing under Vista, but is very stable and does the basics well (record, playback, compare), so we're confident that it is in good shape for you to try out.

Let us know if you would like to try it out. We expect to have it packaged with an install by the end of the week and will be sending it out to interested customers.

Note that the IE component is not yet available for testing, and that is the current focus.

Send an email to support and we'll add your name to the list.

Vista, Vista and more Vista

It has been a long, hard process going down this road to Vista compatibility, but things are moving along well. We hit a major snag with getting the hooks working properly, but that is now a thing of the past and we're surging ahead with testing to see if there are any other incompatibilities with Vista.

So far, so good. It's a little early to call this a beta, but if you are a licensed user and would like to try out HighTest on Vista, let us know in support and we'll work to get you a copy of the latest and greatest development version for you to try out. It is very stable and includes a lot of new features that have finally, after many years, found their way into the product.

All, in all, working with Vista hasn't been really that bad. There are a lot of naysayers out there that say how bad Vista is, but short of a few bugs in the OS that the general user is going to run into, Vista looks nice and we like it.

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.

International Keyboard Testers Wanted

We have completed the updates to HighTest to include support for international keyboards and characters. You should now be able to enter any regular key from your keyboard regardless of the language setting you are using.

HighTest will also record the keystroke sequences for those two-keypress characters that exist on some languages. While it won't show you the actual character, it will record the two keystrokes which upon playback, will display the proper character.

But because we don't have access to every language keyboard that exists, we're looking for your help. If you are using HighTest for other than US English, we would like you to try out and update to HighTest 5.5 that includes the updated key support.

Because this is a new feature, it is limited to registered customers that are using HighTest 5.5. If you would like to help test out this feature, send an email to support@vtsoft.com and tell us that you saw this in the blog and would like to participate.

This update would also include a number of bug fixes that have been done recently, so you would get the very latest patch set for 5.5.

Rich.

Keys, characters and language

Sometimes it's all in how we say something that makes the difference. Isn't that what we're always told? Well, how we say even sometime simple like "Yes" can make a big difference. You're probably thinking of the tone we use, or the look we give when we say it, but I'm not talking about any of that. The letters that compose that word are different for each language that you say it in. Sometimes that's an issue, sometimes it's not.

Unfortunately in HighTest's case, it does make a difference. Yesterday, a customer came to us and said that they were trying to input some non-English characters such as ç and HighTest was not very happy with that. The source of the problem is deeply rooted in HighTest's roots. When we first started developing this tool in 1992, the thought that HighTest might be used around the world and be easily accessible via the internet wasn't even a consideration. So to make HighTest as lean and mean as possible (and that's still our goal), they only included support for English, a choice that was fine then, but has come back to bite us since then.

With a little research, it turns out that providing you have the correct input language and keyboard set, HighTest is very happy playing back the characters in question. The issue that we did find, is that the support for only English that I mentioned before causes issues if you want to edit a script with non-English characters in it. HighTest is not very happy with those characters and kicks them back as invalid.

The good news is that it appears that with not much effort, we can make HighTest support just about any single-byte character set. The only issue I see offhand is how to deal with recording dead characters that result in a different character when the second key is pressed. Hopefully that won't be much of an issue and we can resolve that and get much improved international character support.

If you have any insights, we would like to hear them. Just email us at support@vtsoft.com. We're always looking for suggestions on how to speed development and add some of the more difficult features to HighTest.

Keep your eye on this blog. If things go as planned, we may have some updates that you can test out with your target language to make sure that we have the bases covered. That way we can be sure that the updates work for everyone.

Have a wonderful Tuesday! I'll chat with you later.

Ongoing development

As you may have guessed, work is continuing on the next release of HighTest. This has been a much longer and more complicated cycle than we had anticipated due to the issues surrounding Vista and the UAC (User Access Control) security that is built into it.

We have been working at resolving the issues, but because HighTest uses Windows hooks, getting them to work under Vista has not been a walk in the park. If you have any insights into this process, send them to us at Support@vtsoft.com and you will have our eternal gratitude.

Of course, Vista compatibility is not the only enhancement in the works. Maybe, just maybe, some details of the additional new features will leak out as we go along here, but I can't make any promises, except that there are some significant new features that I think you will love. You have been asking for some of these features for a long time and we have finally put them in.

If you would like a preview of the new features in HighTest before the rest of the world, sign up to be a beta tester and as soon as we enter the beta process, we'll contact you regarding your interest in being involved. We'll have more to say about this in the future, so stay tuned!

If you have new features you would like to see in HighTest, we are always wanting to hear from you. Just send your feature requests to Support@vtsoft.com and we will add them to our suggestion list. The more a request is made (by different people, of course), the sooner you might see that feature.