On Wed, 19 Feb 2014, Alistair Leslie-Hughes wrote: [...]
Would it be possible to test windows 8 without the firewall enabled?
It's going to be hard to get patches accepted if win8 keeps failing.
I looked into this and the problem is not with the firewall. The issue is that DirectPlay is deprecated on Windows 8. As a result the libraries are not installed by default and when an application tries to load them one gets a dialog that says:
An app on your pc needs the following windows feature DirectPlay
This then offers to install it and the application remains stuck until the user says yes or no. That's why the test times out.
One option would be to trigger this dialog so DirectPlay is installed. This dialog will then no longer be triggered and the test will run fine. That's what I have done on the w864 VM some time back.
However it may be better for the test to detect that the dll is missing and to skip if that's the case. Otherwise even if I fix the issue on this VM we'll still get failures from any other Windows 8 system for which the user did not go through these steps.
I suspect a simple LoadLibrary() will trigger that dialog too so some other approach may be needed. Maybe something based on FindExecutable() would work.