On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 17:49:45 -0800, Ranga Nathan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You would use Windows Scripting tool for that. Check-out WSH (Windows > Scripting Host). > There are many macros that do just that and as it was pointed out, this > has caused many security exploitations in windows.
And now that there is serious venture capital behind adware, some of the more difficult security exploits are getting hit hard. For instance I've heard that that internal Windows messages have *no* security infrastructure. Any application can send a message to any other application and there is no way for the recipient to figure out who the message is really from. (To exploit you have to send the right message to the right application when it is expecting to see a message that can be confused with yours.) A friend who supports a lot of small businesses is predicting that by the end of this year, Windows will essentially be unusable on the Internet. This seems extreme to me, but I don't keep track of these things, he does, and he has pretty good insight into the industry. > There is software like Win Runner (Mercury tools I think) and Load Runner > that do this kind of thing for repeated testing of Windows applications. > You should be able to do this in Perl too. > You will be playing keystrokes to get to the buttons, basically like > screen-scraping. Sounds like a lot more work than, say, finding the right module to send email directly. A fun issue is popups. Everything works fine and then someday there is an unexpected error and a popup stops everything in its tracks. Sure, you can probably put in some kind of search for popups that makes them go away, but do you dare? Until you see them do you know whether it is safe to ignore this popup? The issue here isn't even gui vs command line, the same problem was the bane of expect scripts. It is fairly simple to teach the computer what happens if everything goes right. But in manipulating someone else's user interface you discover boundary cases the hard way - one by one. The result is very fragile. Cheers, Ben _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
