Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 released–new set of Testing capabilities

  • Článek

I am very happy to announce that we have just released Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 – which extends the Visual Studio 2010 product with a great set of capabilities – this time in the area of Testing. As you know, we have adopted a concept of feature pack releases which enhance and complement the capabilities we released with the Visual Studio 2010 product earlier in the year. These feature packs are available to MSDN subscribers only, and can now be downloaded from the MSDN accounts.

The first feature pack we had released was focused on code visualization and modeling feature. Feature Pack 2 is focused on enhancing the testing capabilities! The feature packs are cumulative – so, Feature Pack 2 will also include the modeling capabilities from Feature Pack 1. The Feature pack setup will ask you to install a pre-requisite QFE that contains the product changes necessary for the new capabilities.

There are three capabilities included in this release:

  • Testing Silverlight Applications

  • Recorded test playback on Firefox

  • A Coded UI Test editor

Testing Silverlight Applications

Testing of Silverlight 4 applications has now become much easier with Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2. From Microsoft Test Manager, you can now capture action recording of your manual tests of Silverlight 4  applications and fast forward it in future iterations of the test case.  When a developer is creating a Silverlight 4 application, he needs to ensure that it is test-ready. He can do this by adding a conditional reference to the Silverlight UI Automation Helper assembly. The new Silverlight 4 Test Package then establishes a connection between the Silverlight application hosted in Internet Explorer and the Visual Studio UI Test Framework. This connection is used to identify properties of Silverlight Controls.  Using this infrastructure, Microsoft Test Manager can now capture intent aware action recording on Silverlight applications.

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NOTE: Out of browser Silverlight applications are not supported in this release.

An automation engineer can now create Coded UI Tests which target Silverlight application. A powerful set of Silverlight UITesting APIs are now available in Visual Studio. Each Silverlight control has a rich set of properties also.

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For more details see the article on MSDN - Testing Silverlight Applications with Coded UI Tests or Action Recordings

Recorded Test playback on Firefox

Cross browser testing with Mozilla Firefox is now enabled on Microsoft Test Manager and Visual Studio 2010. Any existing action recording or Coded UI Test may now be played back on the Mozilla Firefox browser. After Starting a test in Test Runner, click the drop-down list next to Play in the toolbar and select Change browser for playback.

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In Coded UI Test, you can change the browser for playback using the following code snippet.

BrowserWindow.CurrentBrowser = "Firefox"

For more details, see article on MSDN - Recording Tests Using Windows Internet Explorer and Playing Back Using Mozilla Firefox

The Coded UI Test editor

In Visual Studio 2010, it is difficult to modify UI Test Files. The UI Test Files store the information about the controls interacted with during a test and the actions performed them.  Updating any artifact in the UI Test file involved modifying XML or moving the code to UIMap.cs and thereby moving it out of the ambit of Coded UI Test Builder. This has been one of the top customer feedback on Visual Studio 2010. Coded UI Test Editor now makes the overall maintenance story for Coded UI Test simpler and easier. When you double-click on a UI Test file in a Test Project, it will launch the graphical editor. 

You can now perform most of your maintenance activities from the Coded UI Test Editor. [renaming a method or control, updating the properties of a control or action]. If you make a mistake, use the standard Undo/Redo operations to recover. The find features will help you narrow down the method, action or control you want to act on. Whenever you select an action in the “UI Actions” pane, the corresponding controls is highlighted in the “UI Control Map”  pane. Similarly whenever you choose a control in the “UI Control Map” pane, all actions which reference this controls is highlighted in the “UI Actions” pane.

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For more details, See article on MSDN - Editing Coded UI Tests Using the Coded UI Test Editor

I am sure these testing capabilities will be a top draw for our customers. Do write back with your views on how you are adopting these features.

Cheers!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 11, 2011
    Hi AmitHow are you doing?I was wondering if you could email a good number and time to talk to you for few mins  (anildixitqa@gmail.com).I can compensate for your time on Automation of Test cases in MTM.Thank youAnil Dixit
  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2011
    Hi Amit,Can not do Automated Recording when using custom controls.  Can you direct me to somearticles.
  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2011
    Hi Marianne,You can refer to blogs.msdn.com/.../content-index-for-coded-ui-test.aspx for the topics on Silverlight 4 automation.For any failures that you see, please post the query with failure information at social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../threads.Thanks,Neeraja
  • Anonymous
    October 13, 2011
    Hi Amit, can we use web test recording to record actions on silverlight?