Testing support for Silverlight apps in Visual Studio 2010

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Whenever we talk about platform coverage for UI automation one of the frequent requests is support for Silverlight app testing. We have been hard at work trying to cater to this need and here is an update on where we are with this roadmap.

We are working on adding support for Silverlight controls for “Fast forward for manual testing” and “Coded UI Tests”. The focus is on line-of-business applications built with Silverlight 4 for both in-browser and on the desktop. The initial investigation is in progress and we are working with the Silverlight team to close on the overall design. We are planning to release a CTP version of a plugin by Q2CY2010. This will be delivered out of band to active MSDN subscribers (Test Pro, Premium and Ultimate) only. We are establishing the final release timeline yet.

Here is a picture of the state of our current Silverlight support

Testing for Silverlight apps

Test case authoring

Works – agnostic to client tech

Manual test case execution

Pure manual testing with pass/fail marking, bug filing works fine

Data diagnostic adapters

 

Fastfwd/action log

Not supported – work in progress. Plugin for UI automation for SL apps will be release out of band post Dev10

Intellitrace

No specific support for SL apps. You could use Intellitrace to profile the business logic in the web app. For instance, collect IT logs on the web server remotely

Test Impact

No specific support for SL apps. You could collect TI logs on the web server remotely

Code coverage

No VS integration. Use separate command line at https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightut

From command line: use msbuild /t:coveragetest after id-ing the assembly to instrument in the unit test project file  

Event log

Works as is

Video recorder

Works as is

Unit tests

Separate download available from https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightut. SL unit test project is a separate project template in VS. Same test metadata as the VS unit test project. Runs from VS or through command line. Generates trx files as test results.

Coded UI tests

Not supported – work in progress. Plugin for UI automation for SL apps will be release out of band post Dev10

Web performance tests

Web perf tests work at the protocol layer, the SL client pieces are not tested. However SL apps could use WCF/JSON/REST protocols to communicate with the server. Editing and playback for these payloads do not have great support right now. Might be addressed in the future via plugins built on extensibility points

Load tests

Use the web perf tests as part of the load test. No specific perf counters for SL apps

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2010
    It's great to know that the Silverlight support in Test Manager is comming. Great product, congrats!

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2010
    Any update on this? Q2 is almost over. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    August 21, 2010
    When will Test Manager have Silverlight support? We are beginning to build a SL 4.0 web application and are to use Microsoft Test Manager.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2010
    I'm also wondering when this support is going to be available. Our team has a commercial SL 4.0 application and we were hoping to use MS TM 2010 for UI automation and can't. We're forced to use a 3rd party tool that doesn't integrate into our TFS 2010 setup.

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2011
    Hi. Any update on this topic? Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2011
    Hi, any news on CTP version of a plugin for sliverlight?

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2011
    This has been released in Feature Pack 2. I think you need to download it from your MSDN subscription. msdn.microsoft.com/.../ff655021.aspx One note that isn't very clear, there is no support for Out Of Browser silverlight apps at the moment.