Forum Overview :: BIT.TRIP RUNNER
 
TestStack.White by Fullofkittens 02/08/2016, 3:53pm PST
Jonesy said a while back that he was surprised that MS hadn't developed Win 10 in such a way that it was as easy to automate as a website is with Selenium. Well, in reality, MS thought they did do that by creating the MS UI Automation library around when WPF got popular, but of course, like all low-level Windows things, you have to be a goddamned Microsoft MVP to understand how it works. However, the good people at the open-source project TestStack share ICJ's (and my) consternation re: why our lives aren't easier and actually did something about it.

...or started to, anyway. I've spent a couple of days playing with this thing and have come to a couple of conclusions.

  1. It's way better than MS's Coded UI testing framework. CUIT relies on searching for UI elements every time the test runs, so you have to come up with ways to find things which can be a giant pain in in the ass, especially in things like repeaters because it oddly doesn't let you search by innertext. But moreover, because it doesn't know where to look things, CUIT is very fucking slow. I watched a tutorial video where the guy benchmarked the two of them and saw a 5x improvement in test execution time using White.

  2. Another nice thing about it is that it treats the desktop's visual tree like a webpage's DOM looks to Selenium. At the top you've got the desktop, and then you've got applications, and beneath those are a bunch of branches of UI things inside other UI things. Also like Selenium: you basically have to add some test attributes to anything you want to automate because, for example, labels don't have any kind of identifier that the thing will be able to find text by. But luckily WPF at least (and, I assume Java?) has an AutomationID attribute built-in that is a first-class citizen from White's perspective.


The downside of it is that it is currently documented very poorly. I should probably be a good open-source person and contribute to fixing that problem. But I don't want to deal with open-source people =(
NEXT REPLY QUOTE
 
TestStack.White by Fullofkittens 02/08/2016, 3:53pm PST NEW
    MS can't even stick with a UI toolkit by Gently Masturbated by a XAML 02/08/2016, 9:48pm PST NEW
        MS can't stick with fucking anything by Rafiki 02/09/2016, 8:20am PST NEW
            See, this is why I stick with web dev on *nix by Entropy Stew 02/09/2016, 7:28pm PST NEW
 
powered by pointy