Morae Screen Text search not capturing screen text in WPF app

Question

When I try to use Morae Manager 3.0 to run a Screen Text search on a recording of our prototype (coded in WPF, .NET version 3.5 SP1), the only things that come up are the window titles. We are using Windows XP.

Even when I search for something that is editable, like text typed into a text box, it does not come up.

Screen text for things outside the prototype (e.g. desktop icons) still comes up perfectly.

I contacted TechSmith support on two separate occassions and both times the reply I got was it must be an issue with our technology, since the screen text search does work for other things, and that the support people are not developers and thus do not know what might be causing this.

Does anyone know:

1. what precisely might be causing this -- e.g. does WPF's rendering engine bypass some sort of Windows layer where Morae looks for text (please forgive me for any errors in terminology)
2. if there is anything I can tweak in the prototype to fix it
3. how I can get through to someone at TechSmith who knows the answers to 1. and 2.

P.S. Morae is a wonderful product and we've usually had great support from TechSmith. We are only having problems with this one little thing, and one can hardly blame Morae for not being compatible with something as new as WPF.

Answer 1

I have no idea what Morae is or how it works, but one big difference between WPF and for example WinForms is the following, copied from here:

When you create a WPF Window, WPF creates a top-level HWND, and uses an HwndSource to put the Window and its WPF content inside the HWND. The rest of your WPF content in the application shares that singular HWND.

If Morae depends on HWNDs to find texts on the screen, this could explain why it can not find the text box. In contrast, i believe in WinForms every control (button, textbox) has its own HWND.