Web Automation Testing with Selenium and .Net Framework
In today’s era of fast-paced technology, where quick software delivery is the key to success, automated testing using Selenium web-driver is a very useful component that provides the capabilities to interact with web browsers and is very helpful for testing purposes.
The Microsoft .Net framework supports the necessary plugins for Selenium through its packet managers and can be used very easily to integrate with any .Net-based web applications. Selenium can then be integrated with more advanced testing frameworks such as NUnit, TestNG, and Cucumber to support scalable acceptance-driven testing frameworks.
Setting Up Selenium with .Net
The best way to start setting up the web automation testing capability is by using Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE, where all the required packages are available in the nuget repository.
There will be many versions of web drivers available in the package manager based on the type of browsers you will be using to perform your tests, such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
Selenium can be integrated with almost any programming language, as it is an open-source plugin. In this project I am using a C#.Net program as an example.
Selenium: Accessing the Browser
We will primarily be using two imports from Selenium based on the browser you select for your program.
The C#.Net code example below should be good enough for a quick test to see if it can access your local Chrome browser:
using System;
using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
namespace AutomatedWebTesting
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
IWebDriver webDriver = new ChromeDriver("Physical path to chromedriver.exe");
webDriver.Url = "www.google.com";
}
}
}
Once you run the application, you should see a Chrome browser open up with the URL address you have provided.
Here is what the console output should look like:
Starting ChromeDriver 90.0.4190.89 (a467d926e8exxxxyusj-refs/branch-heads/4190@{#429}) on port 41848
Only local connections are allowed.
Please see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/security-considerations for suggestions on keeping ChromeDriver safe.
ChromeDriver was started successfully.
If you are looking for more detailed capabilities of what Selenium chrome-driver provides, please refer to the link below: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/capabilities
Conclusion
Overall, this is just an example to help you get started using Selenium. It has enormous capabilities that can be used in both Web-based and mobile automated testing, where you can customize your tests to access various web elements and verify them against specific use cases.