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External Script Stuff
by Aaron Smith on Saturday, March 28 2009If you're interested in Window-Eyes scripting, but are not a member of the gw-scripting email list, shame on you. Also, the following, recent post from Ron might be of interest:
There's been a lot of discussion lately on using VB.net to create external scripts for Window-Eyes, and it's split across several sometimes very large discussion threads, so I thought I'd create another brand-new thread with what I think is a definitive statement on VB.net. Unfortunately, it looks like there is a small but significant problem that prevents some VB.net applications from working properly. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be our bug; it looks like it could be an obscure bug in the .net interop code, though I haven't found any independent confirmation of that yet. We've got a workaround for it, but it won't be available until version 7.1. This affects all scripts that want to use our custom UI code and all scripts that want to register hotkeys, as well as anything that uses any other non-event-based callbacks. I know I said previously that I had Jamal's Fruit Basket script working, but it turns out that - against all odds - in the process of figuring out what needed to be done to make it work, I had inadvertently added just the workaround we needed to fix the interop problem. Also, it turns out that there were a couple bugs in our IDL file - and thus in the resulting TLB file - that were breaking event handling for some high-level languages including vb.net. That's something that could be worked around for 7.0, but in combination with the above problem, it seems like it might just be better to say that VB.net and Window-Eyes 7.0 just don't quite work together. The good news is, all of this will be fixed in Window-Eyes 7.1. The better news is that Window-Eyes 7.1 will be a free upgrade if you already have Window-Eyes 7.0, so once it's released (sometime in April, they say) there shouldn't be any reason for anyone to still be running 7.0. Meanwhile, we'll take some time to put together sample VB.net and C# projects that do event handling and callbacks and client identification and all that jazz, and we'll make that available around the same time as 7.1. We'll also generate an official interop assembly and make that and the updated IDL and TLB and so on available as part of a new SDK. The upshot of all this is that if you want to develop scripts using a .net language, you might find that it's a lot easier if you just put it off a month or so and try again with the new tools that'll be available then.You can join in the conversation by signing up for gw-scripting at http://www.gwmicro.com/support/email_lists/.
