Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Selenium Toolkit for .NET 0.84 Released

Welcome 2011, things are shaping up to be a great year.  Things have been quiet around here, aside from the limited notices I sent out on twitter, you may not have noticed that I published two releases of the Selenium Toolkit for .NET since November.

So what's new in the Toolkit?

While there have been a few minor fixes and code changes, the last two releases for the toolkit have been focused on keeping the toolkit current with its external dependencies (NUnit / Selenium / Selenium IDE).  As such, expect to see more frequent releases this year.

By far, the biggest change in the toolkit is the new WiX based installer.  While I’m personally excited about the ability to include the installer as part of an automated build, you can do a lot of great things with WiX’s declarative syntax that would normally require custom code.  For example, the installer is able to conditionally deploy files based on the presence of a registry key and folder value.

The second biggest change (enabled through the WiX installer) is a resolution to a common problem related to the Toolkit’s NUnit addin.  Without going into the specific details, the short story is that NUnit Addins only work with the version of NUnit it was compiled with.  This leads to some confusion where users would copy the addin to their recently installed latest version of NUnit only to find out the hard way that nothing works.  Since version 0.83 the installer now includes separate NUnit version specific addins and will deploy them to the appropriate NUnit addin folder during installation.  NUnit versions 2.5.3, 2.5.5, 2.5.7, 2.5.8 and 2.5.9 are now supported as separate addins.

In case you’re wondering, 2.5.4 and 2.5.6 were published for only a few weeks before they were superseded by 2.5.5 and 2.5.7 respectively.

Also, you asked, I listened: the Toolkit is now published as both an MSI and ZIP.

What about Selenium 2.0 / WebDriver?

As my current project at work is a monster WPF application, I haven’t had a lot of cycles to play with the new WebDriver feature-set.  This may change, as I’m planning on reaching out to some web-based projects within my organization and offer some test guidance.

As far as Selenium 2.0 betas are concerned, I am keeping a close eye on the project and as soon as the .NET bindings and overall functionality stabilize I may upgrade the internal bits to leverage the 1.0 backward compatible features in the 2.0 beta (WebDriverBackedSeleniumBrowser).  I may even fork the code and offer two releases.  Time will tell, as will your feedback.

So with that, short-n-sweet – Happy New Year.  You can find the latest release here:  http://seleniumtoolkit.codeplex.com/releases/view/58383

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