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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].”