Last week I posted about looking into the keyboard locking up issue in Visual Studio.  So far it looks like not a lot of people have replied to provide concrete repro steps, which confirms my suspicion that this is somewhat of a random issue.

So at this point, I have a couple of choices.  I can either wait for somebody in the community to provide a repro of the problem that I can reliably run into, or I can do the work myself.

I’m going to do both, so while I’m waiting for more possible bug reports, I’m going to write a tool that models the behavior of a typical Visual Studio user and use that to hopefully isolate the problem.

I’ve chosen to go with this path since given the information in the bug reports, it seems people hit the issue with many different configurations in many different scenarios.  This means that me sitting down without any solid repro steps is likely not going to be a good use of time.  Instead, I’m going to go with a model-based testing approach where I will define a series of actions that a user in VS can do, and then proceed to run my model.  I’ll let you guys know how this works out for isolating bugs :)

I’m using an internal tool for the model engine and AutoIt for the UI automation (I want something lightweight for a one-off).  One of the challenges will be getting feedback: AutoIt is great at driving, but not so great at understanding what success and failure means.