Running Selenium tests from Visual Studio – Step by step

From Firefox, record new selenium test, for example for Google search

Export the test to C# web drive

This is how it looks like after export

Open visual studio, create new test project

By default the file UnitTest1.cs is created

Create a new cs file, name it for example GoogleSearch

Copy the code from the cs file generated by selenium and paste it in the file GoogleSearch.cs

Add reference in the project to Selenium .Net WebDriver, WebDriver.dll and WebDriver.Support.dl

Now the references added, you can see that the editor recognizes the selenium name spaces

using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Firefox;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI;

Find and replace “TestFixture” to “TestClass”, “SetUp” to “TestInitialize()”, “Test” to “TestMethod”, “TearDown” to “TestCleanup()”

To run with Chrome, download chromedriver.exe from https://code.google.com/p/chromedriver/downloads/list, place it in the bin folder

Change the driver in the code to Chrome then run the test

driver = new OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome.ChromeDriver();

Running the test, chrome will open, and Google search page will be displayed, displaying search results then closed

This was a step by step example on running selenium test from visual studio

Mostly used visual studio keyboard shortcuts

below are the shortcuts that I mostly  use in visual studio, descriptions taken from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/da5kh0wa.aspx

shortcut	description
CTRL+F	Displays the Quick tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
CTRL+SHIFT+F	Displays the In Files tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
CTRL+H	Displays the replace options on the Quick tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
CTRL+SHIFT+H	Displays the replace options on the In Files tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
CTRL+F3	Finds the next occurrence of the currently selected text, or the word at the cursor.
CTRL+SHIFT+F3	Finds the previous occurrence of the currently selected text, or the word at the cursor.
F3	Finds the next occurrence of the search text.
SHIFT+F3	Finds the previous occurrence of the search text.
CTRL+K, R or SHIFT+F12	Displays the list of references for the selected symbol.
F7	View code, For the selected item, opens the corresponding file and puts the cursor in the correct location.
SHIFT+F7	Switches to Design view for the current document. Available only in Source view.
F12	Go to definition
CTRL+M, CTRL+A	Collapses all regions on the page to show just the outermost groups in the hierarchy; typically the using/imports section and the namespace definition.
CTRL+M, CTRL+T	Hides the selected HTML tag and displays an ellipsis (. . .) instead. You can view the complete tag as a tooltip by putting the mouse pointer over the ellipsis.
CTRL+M, CTRL+O	Collapses existing regions to provide a high-level view of the types and members in the source file.
CTRL+K, CTRL+D or CTRL+E, D	Formats the current document according to the indentation and code formatting settings specified on the Formatting pane in the Options dialog box, for the current language.
CTRL+L	Cuts all selected lines, or the current line if nothing has been selected, to the Clipboard.
CTRL+SHIFT+L	Deletes all selected lines, or the current line if no selection has been made.

Running selenium tests from visual studio

I was doing some testing using selenium, the way I was running tests at the beginning is through NUnit,  I thought to give it a try to use the visual studio to run the tests instead.

In visual studio 2010, I created a test project, added a new class file to it, named it selenium test

Added the basic test functions and attributes

the class attribute, and changed the class to be public

    [TestClass()]
    public class SeleniumTest

Added Initialization and Cleanup methods

        [TestInitialize()]
        public void MyTestInitialize()
        {

        }

        [TestCleanup()]
        public void MyTestCleanup()
        {

        }

Added my test method

        [TestMethod()]
        public void TheApplyByQIDWebControlTest()
        {

        }

Next I took my initial cs file generated from Selenium IDE, opened it, mapped from NUnit functions to VS test functions, so code in [SetUp] went to [TestInitialize()] , code from [TearDown] went to [TestCleanup()] , code from [Test] went to the [TestMethod()]

I also added reference to selenium .NET dlls, built the project with no errors

Next I opened the Test View, my test method appeared in it, I clicked on run, the test started and I was able to run selenium test from visual studio