Microsoft Visual Studio UI Test Plugin for Silverlight

A new version of the installer has been uploaded, This will now work with Visual Studio 2012 RTM. It also fixes some issues that were reported for this plugin installation on Test Agent and Test Professional SKUs. You will need to uninstall any previous version of this plugin and then install the current version.

Using the Microsoft Visual Studio UI Test plugin for Silverlight, you can create Coded UI Tests or action recordings for Silverlight applications. Action recordings let you fast forward through steps in a manual test using Microsoft Test Manager. Coded UI Tests let you record actions, generate code and play back user interface tests using Microsoft Visual Studio.

This plugin supports Silverlight 4 & 5 applications hosted in Internet Explorer versions 8, 9 & 10. It requires Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 RTM.

If you are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2013, please usethis version of the UI Test plugin for Silverlight.

A few members of the product team got together and built this plugin as an off-hours project. It is not an official Microsoft release. We will monitor the Q and A section on this VS Galley site for feedback and queries. 

Installation steps

0. Prerequisites

You need to have any one of the following Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 SKUs installed on the machine – Ultimate, Premium, Test Controller, Test Agent or Team Foundation Server.

1. Download the installer.

2. Double-click on UITestPluginForSilverlight.msi to install.

Steps to enable this feature

1. Setup your Silverlight application to include a helper assembly which enables UI Testing.

a. Add a reference to Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Extension.SilverlightUIAutomationHelper in your Silverlight Application.

b. Verify that each Silverlight Control has a unique identification property.

Detailed description of the procedure is given in the MSDN article - How to: Set Up Your Silverlight Application for Testing.  This MSDN article describes the steps applicable for Silverlight 4 applications. These same instructions apply now for Silverlight 5 applications. 

2. Use Microsoft Visual Studio to create Coded UI Tests to test  Silverlight applications.

Detailed steps are given in this MSDN article- Walkthrough: Creating,Editing and Maintaining a Coded UI Test for Silverlight Application.

NOTE: You have to add a reference to Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Extension.Silverlight in your Coded UI Test Project. This assembly can be found in %Program Files%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSTT\11.0\UITestExtensionPackages

Resources

1. Testing Silverlight Applications with Coded UI Tests or Action Recordings [MSDN]
2. How to fetch properties of a Silverlight Control [Blog]
3. Understand the search logic for Silverlight Controls  [Blog]
4. How to validate properties of nested controls in Silverlight [Blog]
5. Test Automation for Silverlight DataGrid in Coded UI Test [Blog] 
6. Visual Studio UI Automation Testing (includes CodedUI) [MSDN Forums] – We encourage you to use the Q and A section
   of this Visual Studio Gallery for questions pertaining to this plugin.
7. For more information on Coded UI Test - Content Index for Coded UI Test

Deepak Singhal, Mathew Aniyan, Siddhartha Pandey, Tapas Sahoo, Vishnupriyan Radhamanalan.