Docklight News

UPDATE 2025/09 - It seems that contrary to Microsoft's roadmap announcement some Windows 11 24H2 new installations come with the VBSCRIPT Windows Feature disabled by default. Please see our related Windows 11 24H2 troubleshooting info for more details and instructions to fix this.  Original news item from 2025/01, with updated release plan for Docklight V2.5:  As we have stepped into 2025, it's a good time to discuss our ideas for the future of Docklight and Docklight Scripting.  Docklight and Docklight Scripting have always been developed and maintained with an "it just runs" focus, carefully maintaining full compatibility and avoiding any breakage with any new release. At the same time, the software world continues to evolve or is even revolutionized by AI tools, and a newly designed Docklight today would certainly look different from our existing Windows offerings.  So let's provide some answers to some obvious questions. (And, no, I didn't ask ChatGPT to ...

UPDATED 2023-03: We now included the Visual Studio Code preset described below in the free Docklight Scripting v2.4.11 update . This also fixes the CPU load problem that came up with v2.4.5. - The original post from January, with some improvements concerning the VS Code editor integration - Let's start this new year with a great tip for anyone who writes his/her own Docklight scripts to automate things. Docklight's built-in script editor is very basic by design and we never felt we should add the weight of a fully-fledged code editor to Docklight. Instead, Docklight Scripting offers you to integrate your favorite code editor via the menu Scripting > Customize / External Editor  . Now, for many years Notepad++ has been the Docklight default and my go-to solution for any script editing. But things changed last year once I tried Visual Studio Code - I was immediately won over. One of the many benefits of Visual Studio Code is its well-documented Command Line Interface. So he...

( UPDATED 2022/02  - Use Docklight V2.4 and additional winetricks) Summary / TL;DR How to run Docklight on your Linux desktop without using VirtualBox/Windows ?  Use  WineHQ package and winetricks !  We successfully tested the access and use of serial ports (tty) and networking (TCP / UDP) functions, but display output is significantly slower than on VirtualBox .  For installation, use a 32-bit WINEPREFIX and  winetricks  corefonts consolas vb6run richtx32 comdlg32ocx comctl32ocx wsh57 . Experimental use only “Use at own risk” - The below description of Docklight installation and use on Linux desktop computers is for experimental use. It is currently not recommended in production environments. Limitations / Known issues -  For tty / serial ports, use Docklight V2.4 versions (e.g. the  Docklight Scripting V2.4 Preview ), not V2.3. Docklight Tap Pro and Docklight Tap 485 cannot be accessed.  In Docklight Scripting, some VBScript sys...

UPDATED 2016-06: See our latest extensions and USB HID related fixes for Windows 10 . Did you design a custom USB HID device and wonder why you cannot test its application protocol with the same ease as serial COM (RS232, ..) or network TCP connections?  Well we did, too, along with quite a few of our users. So it was high time to get this feature off the wishlist and into the software. See the Docklight FAQ - USB HID , or download the new software directly from here:  https://docklight.de/download/Docklight_Scripting.zip While we are still on our way to a concise and fully documented implementation, we found the current V2.0.200 version already very useful for our own projects with fullmo.de - a Microchip PIC based communication gateway running a custom ASCII protocol via USB HID. How to use Docklight Scripting V2.0.200 can connect to your custom HID device via the VID (vendor ID) and PID (product ID) code, if you use the following commun...

Dear Docklight Users, During the past couple of months we have been building and fine-tuning a new software package to assist you with the following scenario: You have a serial communications application, like an embedded device talking to a PC. You have already manually tested its functionality and created a Docklight project for it, maybe even a Docklight script for some basic automation. But what you actually need is to have your own application talk to the device. This could be a simple Microsoft Excel worksheet, but also any C++/C/C#/Java Windows application. Here is where our new “Docklight DLL” package fits right in. It provides a set of commands allowing you to load existing Docklight projects and use the same communications processing and Send/Receive Sequence functionality that is available in the Docklight Scripting desktop application. More information and download links are available on our Docklight web site: http://docklight.de/information/#docklight...