Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Copying Messagebox Text

Here's a little nugget of information that I think is not widely known:

What do you do when you're testing a program, and a message box pops up to display an error condition? Well, most of my testers will ALT-PrintScreen and email the whole screenshot to me. Then, I must manually type the message into a textbox if I'm searching the Internet for information about the error.

Well, it seems that there's been the ability all this time to just hit CTRL-C when the messagebox is modal, and onto the clipboard will go a text-only version of the messagebox contents, including title, message, and buttons!

For example, I'm currently being forced to create some Crystal Reports (I'm sorry for using such obscenities) for a client. Of course, something is not installed or configured correctly, because the designer is showing an error via a messagebox. Well, CTRL-C on that error gives me the following:

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Crystal Reports ActiveX Designer
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Failed to load database information.
Details: The database DLL 'crdb_adoplus.dll' could not be loaded.
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OK
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