Teknologika

One of the more interesting and less documented features of VSTS is how to handle the ever changing port of your local development server when running unit tests. This really becomes an issue when you want to write WatiN tests that can run out of the box on any developers machine or a server that is performing continuous integration.

As part of this week’s Teched, Mitch Denny has organized a Smith Family community project to develop an application for the smith family. My contribution was to port WatiN to .net 2.0 (again), so it didn’t have my recent enhancements.

The next step was to write a test that used WatiN, but would work with the TFS continuous integration tool Chris Burrows, without a hardcoded test server. Whilst not the exact code, Chris showed me how to utilise the AspNetDevelopmentServer attribute from the Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.Web namespace to work with the local ASP.NET Development web server. I have written up a short example below that shows how it is done.

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.Web;

using WatiN.Core;

[TestClass]

public class UnitTest1

{

    private TestContext m_testContext;

    public TestContext TestContext

    {

        get { return m_testContext; }

        set { m_testContext = value; }

    }
    public string DevServerURL

    {

        get

        {

            Uri webServer = m_testContext.Properties["AspNetDevelopmentServer.localhost"] as Uri;

            return webServer.AbsoluteUri;

        }

    }
    [TestMethod]

    [AspNetDevelopmentServer("localhost", @"C:\Docu ... \WebSite1")]

    public void TestMethod1()

    {

        using (IE ie = new IE(DevServerURL))

        {

            Assert.IsTrue(ie.MainDocument.ContainsText(”This is a test.”));

        }

    }

}

To make this work you will need to add a COM reference to Microsoft Internet Controls, and a reference to your Watin.Core.dll. To our complete surprise, once we had defined the initial test as part of the team build, it ran first go on the server, sight unseen and passed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Testing, Watin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.