What s Next for Tester?

What's Next for Tester?

As I mentioned earlier, Tester does two things well: recording scripts and playing keystrokes. As with all the utilities in this book, you're welcome to find ways to improve Tester if you're so inclined. Here are some possible enhancements you might pursue:

• Add wrapper classes such as TListBox, TTreeControl, and TRadioButton so that you can check various states and verify that control items contain the proper data. With these classes, you can start validating controls and writing more complicated scripts. You might want to look at the MSAA interfaces to make this work easier.

• Add support during recording for on-the-fly entering of validation and verification code and other necessary code.

• Update the TestRec application to be a little friendlier and offer more help while developing scripts. For example, you could add knowledge of the supported Tester objects to help other developers write their own scripts.

• Add language output options so that you can utilize compiled languages such as C# and Visual Basic .NET (or Microsoft Visual Object Assembler, if Microsoft ever releases it).

• Right now TestRec and Tester support only the US English keyboard. You might want to add true international support to both applications.