Silverlight 3 automation for user training rather than unit testing?

Question

We are developing a Silverlight LOB app. It would be great for users to be able to click a help button on the top of a page and have the app walk them through the functions of the page as though the movements and key strokes were pre-recorded.

I've not really familiar with automation on any GUI framework but googling around it seems most of it is geared towards testing. In my case, i'd want the mouse to move around the screen naturally, so a recording makes more sense. I'm pretty sure I could simulate such a recording with a very detailed timeline but this wouldnt be practical to code.

Is it possible to record an interaction like this and then have it play back purely on an SL client? I dont mind if I have to use an external tool to make the tests, but the training sessions need to run totally in Silverlight.

Answer 1

Its going to way way easier to create a training video using the variety of tools specifically designed for this sort of thing. Results of such tools you have probably already seen when watching demo vids for developing silverlight from site such as Channel9 and MSDN learning.

You could then simply use Silverlight's media elements to run such a video as part of your apps help system.

Creating actual automations that can be watched by a human will be much harder. Bear in that a huge advantage of video is that it can be paused and re-wound which is vital for your objective to actually be achieved well. This would be some thing like monumentally difficult to impossible to do using the automation approach.