How do you get WatiN to work on Windows Server 2008 with IE8?

Question

My problem is that I cannot get a simple WatiN test to reliably work on my development machine which is running Windows Server 2008 and IE8.

I have seen a couple of good posts on this, but am still having problems. Here are the posts:

• MSDN Testing Article
• Stack Overflow - WatiN Second Method Fails

The steps in the first article seemed to help (comment out "::1" in my hosts file, put my site(s) in trusted sites, and making sure my app.config has "STA" and is set to "copy if newer", but they did not help reliably. I tried the code from the second example hoping that it would help but it did not. I am using WatiN version 2.0 beta 1.

My NUnit code looks like the following:

protected Browser Browser { get; set; }

[TestFixtureSetUp]
public void SetupPriorToTestsInThisFixture()
{
    Browser = new IE();
    Browser.GoTo(Constants.SiteCollectionUrl);
}

[TestFixtureTearDown]
public void TearDownAfterTestsInThisFixture()
{
    if (Browser != null)
    {
        Browser.Dispose();
    }
}

[Test]
public void WaterThroughThePipes()
{
    Link link = Browser.Link(Find.ByText("Calendar"));
    bool exists = link.Exists;
    Assert.That(exists, Is.True, "Could not find 'Calendar' link.");
}

What I'm seeing is that sometimes (albeit rarely) my test passes. Sometimes the assertion fails (exists = false), sometimes I get a timeout when trying to open the browser, and sometimes I get an error trying to access link.Exists.

The error accessing link.Exists looks like:

MyFixture.WaterThroughThePipes: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException : The interface is unknown. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706B5)

I can't seem to reproduce the timeout error now so I can't provide that at the moment (although this used to happen all of the time).

I tend to see different results when running this in debug mode vs. not running in debug mode.

For what it's worth, Firefox 3.0.6 has never worked for me. I'd like it to, but need IE to work regardless. Here is the error I get with Firefox.

MyFixture (TestFixtureSetUp): WatiN.Core.Native.Mozilla.FireFoxException : Unable to connect to jssh server, please make sure you have correctly installed the jssh.xpi plugin ----> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException : No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:9997

Any ideas? I really don't want to go back to Selenium (been there, done that), but I may have to.

Answer 1

IE8 definatley works with WatiN, and has done since the first public release of IE8.

If something is working in debug but not when running it usually points to a timing or Server 2008 security lockdown issue.

You should putting the line that is failing in a try catch, then if there is an exception pause for say half a sec and then re-try again.

Also ensure that you have turned off all the extra server security lockdowns, and are running nUnit as administrator to avoid UAC getting in the way.

Answer 2

Regarding the error you're seeing on firefox... That can be overcome by installing the FireWatir FF plugin. (Or at least that worked for me on 3.5.3)

But as already mentioned, IE is supported and in a WatiN context, using FireFox is no magic solution.

Answer 3

Run Visual Studio as Administrator

Answer 4

The other alternative to avoid running Visual Studio or NUnit as an admin would be to disable UAC at a machine level, which shouldn't be a security issue if you are running with least privileges (which you should be).