Is there any way to automate windows forms testing?

Question

I am familiar with nunit for unit testing of the business layer however I am looking now to automate the test of the win forms gui layer.

I have seen watin and the watin recorder for automating tests on web application by accessing the controls and automating them. However I am struggling to find a watin equivalent for windows forms (written in c# or vb.net) preferably that is open source.

Does one exist or are all products based on recording mouse and keyboard presses?

Update: I have look at this blog post on white and it seems the sort of thing I am looking for. The blog post raises some issues but as white is only in version 0.6 these may be resolved. Be interested if others have used white or any others for comparison.

Answer 1

AutomatedQA's TestComplete is a good testing application to automate GUI testing. It supports more than just Windows Forms also, so you can reuse it for other applications. It is not open source and this is the best that I have found. I haven't seen an open source equivalent to WatiN. It does have a free trial, for you decide if you like it or not. The main reason I went with it, is that it really is cost effective, compared to other testing applications.

Answer 2

Check out http://www.codeplex.com/white and http://nunitforms.sourceforge.net/. We've used the White project with success.

Same Answer to a previous question

Answer 3

I second Dale's answer. TestComplete is a fantastic all around automation tool.

Answer 4

You could check out the Microsoft UI Automation framework. This has been included in .NET since version 3.0. This is actually what the White framework uses anyway.

Answer 5

As far as I know, White is an abstraction layer over the top of Microsoft's UI Automation framework. I have written a similar layer that we use internally on our projects and it works great. So White would definattley be worth a look

Microsoft have released the source to UI Automation, so if necessary you should be able to debug right down the whole stack if necessary.

The really cool thing is that with licence cost, you can scale up and run as many machines as you like for execution.

We run inside VSTS and link our results to requirements, but you can use c# express and nUnit and get first class tools and languages for little to no cost.

Answer 6

Here are some links from MSDN Magazine on automatic testing code:

• Using UIAutomation Bugslayer March 2007
• Using PowerShell Test Run December 2007
• Tester, a utility for recording mouse clicks and keystrokes, then playing them back & program checking behaviour. Excellent for unmanaged code. Uses windows handles so may not work well for managed code. Bugslayer March 2002.