in our build we are using a tool that when called raises a dialog that we want to have gone by pressing a button automatically. we use "Wait for control" task and "click" task to do this and it works fine -- as long as the build is running with someone watching it. when it runs on the build server it says "found control" and then "clicked" but the control is not clicked and the dialog remains open.
the issue goes away by simply opening a remote desktop (mstsc) into the server when the build runs. then the click works just fine. is there any way around this? UI automation should be able to work with no interactive user present.. I think. BTW - it will still fail if the mstsc window is MINIMIZED so you cannot see the remote desktop and PASS only if the desktop is not minimized and is active.
has anyone come across this?
the software is CodeVeil (we are trying it out as part of a build to see how well it does)
Unfortunately I don't think there is anything we can do about this. The issue is that applications and message processing work somewhat differently when there is no windows desktop.
Is the message box a result of running the trial or is that how this tool works (I will add it to our actions todo list)? Perhaps you can contact them and ask to implement a better trial mechanism, popping up a dialog in an IDE is fine but it's not very practical when running from the command line.
I just took a look at the codeveil website and now I understand why it has a dialog popping up. To use the product on a build server you need to purchase their "build server license", which incredibly, costs more than most build servers! I recall we looked at this product ourselves, very briefly, but I refuse to purchase products that charge more for usage on a build server than we charge for our build server (ie the platform). I suspect we probably will not get around to implementing support for this product anytime soon.