With its new Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2, Microsoft adds three new capabilities for developers: Silverlight app testing, test playback on Firefox and a coded UI test editor.
Microsoft
has released
Visual
Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2, which provides new testing functionality to the
Visual Studio platform for applications built with Microsoft's Silverlight
technology and more.
Brian
Harry, a Microsoft technical fellow and product unit manager for Microsoft Team
Foundation Server (TFS), said there are
three major new features in Feature Pack 2: testing Silverlight applications,
recorded test playback on Firefox and a coded UI test editor.
And
in
a
Nov. 16 blog post, Amit Chatterjee, managing director of the
Microsoft India Development Center
(MSIDC) and general manager of the Visual Studio Test and Lab Management
business at MSIDC, said, "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."
Meanwhile,
in
a
Nov. 8 post on Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2, Harry said:
"Now
you can test your Silverlight apps as well as your other desktop
applications. We've added support both for coded UI tests and for record
and playback in Microsoft Test Runner (part of Microsoft Test
Professional). You are able to record the execution of your Silverlight
app and gather rich bug data (including action logs, video, environment info
and more). Unfortunately, you can't get Intellitrace logs at this
time. We've tested it on a range of Silverlight apps, including ones with
customer controls and apps generated by LightSwitch. We are waiting on a
few fixes for LightSwitch issues we discovered-they should be available in the
next LightSwitch pre-release.
"Perhaps
the biggest limitation is that, for now, our Silverlight testing support only
works for Silverlight 4.0 applications hosted in IE. In the future, we
will add support for desktop Silverlight applications too. There are a few
other restrictions that you can read about in the docs that accompany the
release but all-in-all, it's a big step forward for testing Silverlight apps."
With
the new recorded test playback support 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 can now be played back on
the Mozilla Firefox browser, Chatterjee said.
With
the existing Visual Studio testing tools, users can record and play back Web
applications in Internet Explorer. Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 enables
users to play back those recordings on Firefox as well.
"Among
other things, this will enable you to create a set of tests once and use them
to regression test on both IE and Firefox," Harry said. "Now you
can make sure your changes don't break apps across multiple browsers."
The
third new feature in the
feature
pack, the Coded UI Test Editor, simplifies the process of managing or
modifying UI test files. The UI test files store the information about the
controls interacted with during a test and the actions performed on them.
"The
Coded UI Test Editor now makes the overall maintenance story for coded UI test
simpler and easier," Chatterjee said. "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]."
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