Proof positive that Bjarne is right. Proof positive that object orientation is here to stay. Proof positive that those high paid butt scratchers who say programming is trivial and Boochie is the almighty are right.

Fidel fished this one up for us. Here is his report:

I was on the lookout for some kind of mouse/keyboard recording and playback system and on the recommendation of a fellow programmer I downloaded a thing called Visual Test from Rational Systems. The download size is a mind boggling 95.1 MB. This has got to be the mega-grand-daddy of bloatware.

When installed it acts as an extension to DevStudio and contains its own programming language for creating automation scripts. Also included is a pretty powerful debugging ability and a good window information gathering tool. However, when recording a sequence it grinds the computer to a snail's pace (on my PIII 800). But 95.1 MB!! I must have been missing something pretty darned huge for a download that size. But for the life of me I could not find any other mega-application that it had installed. Maybe they had some 20 minute full screen instruction video in there or something. Who knows.

After playing around with it for 10 minutes I decided to uninstall it because I was sure there were similarly equipped freeware or shareware products available for doing this. After it had been vanquished from my disk I subsequently discovered it had kindly wiped out two critical files from DevStudio (vcspawn.exe and mspdb60.dll) preventing me from compiling. I had to grab the files from another DevStudio installation to fix it once I'd found out what was wrong.

Oh yes, they want $800 for this piece of blubber.