Sirius C#: adding UI Automation library

Recently we've created code interacting with Win32 and Web. Now it's time to expand the coverage to the .NET area. For this purpose we have dedicated library called UI Automation. This library is provided with .NET framework and contains basic API interacting with window objects. At the same time this library can be used for interaction with the standard Win32 controls, however it can be used as an auxiliary modules to expand the coverage of existing library I created before for interacting with Win32 elements. In this article I will create sample control classes and make some demo showing how it works. Also, in this example I'll take the tab control and create simple tests interacting with it. At this point that would be just stand-alone library but in the future it will be integrated into entire Sirius project.

Sirius: Win32 - add Dialog handling and basic input

Recently I've added functionality working with main windows. Next step is to apply functionality to interact with dialog boxes and child controls. It's almost the same except these are child windows and we should carry out additional relationship to main window. Additionally, we should add basic ability to send mouse and keyboard input. Thus, we'll complete basic functionality for Win32. All other code to be written should cover some control specifics rather than common functionality.

Sirius (Java): writing Win32 client library + Live Demo

Recently I described the creation of Win32 server part and at the end I wrote the function which finds the main window by specified attributes and gets the handle for it. This is quite fundamental thing as once we have a handle of the window we can send any messages to it simulating various GUI interaction actions. At the same time the server side library contains only set of functions as Win32 API is all about the set of functions. But it's too raw for writing tests. It's much more convenient to apply some object model to the window objects. So, it requires some effort on the client side. In this article I'll describe the process of Win32 client API creation. I'll create classes interacting with top level windows and create some sample test to demonstrate how that functionality works.

The final output will contain the functionality interacting with top level Win32 windows as well as some demo showing how to work with it.

Java JNA Win32: when default libraries are not enough

I've been working on implementing Win32 interaction functionality using JNA library and encountered the situation when the library became incomplete. The methods of com.sun.jna.platform.win32.User32 interface which is supplied by the platform library contained only subset of the entire functions of user32.dll library. Actually, I've found that while trying to call GetMenu function. It appeared that there's no such function in the Java class supplied with the JNA library. What to do with that? How to make a Java call for functions from existing DLL?

Sirius: core Win32 functionality support

Once we've done with infrastructure it's time to work on development itself. Now I'll start working on the functionality performing interaction with Win32 objects. In this article I'll describe basic preparations for Win32 interactions as well as I'll describe the core functionality to capture the window on screen and perform some manipulations with it. And of course this activity is done in the scope of Sirius development. So, it would be bound to the entire architecture of the platform.