Grant Holliday

In my recent series of TFS Rosario blog posts, I’ve been looking at all the new features that are available in the April CTP of Visual Studio Team System Codename “Rosario”. In the last CTP, we saw that it was possible to create automated UI tests for both Windows and Web applications.

In this CTP, we can now convert the manual tests into coded UI tests. This is the overview from the mini-story included in the VPC download:

Mini-Story 4: Automate a manual test  & add validation

In this scenario the test manager asks the tester to convert the test into a coded UI test that can run in un-attended mode.  So she generates the code from the background recording & then adds validation code using Visual Studio

The first thing we notice is that there’s a new type of test available in the ‘Add New Test’ dialog.

When you add one of these Coded UI Tests to your application, you get a new class with the [CodedUITest] attribute and an empty constructor.

There’s also a stubbed out TestMethod included. If you right-click, there’s a couple of new context menu options:

If you choose ‘Generate Code from Existing Recording…’ it allows you to select an XML file that has been recorded in a previous test pass using the Manual Test Runner.

Once you load this file, the generated code is magically added to the test method.

You’ll notice here that there’s a new BrowserWindow class in the Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITesting namespace. This looks like it might be very similar to the Watin web automation testing framework.

Now when you run the test, a browser window pops up and each of the links are clicked as-per the coded UI test.

Overall this is a great step from the Visual Studio Team Test guys in addressing the needs of the UI testers. Although I don’t see any of the ‘non-developer testers’ using this stuff much - it will be very handy when a recorded manual test from them needs some specialised tweaking for automation.