WatiN roadmap update

In my last post I talked a bit about what was going on with the project. Following is an update on that post.

WatiN 2.0

Edward Wilde has made some changes to the current CTP code to support FireFox 3.x as well. This will be released within one week. Edward Thanks!

Development for the first beta is still in progress. The FireFox specific classes are added and progress is great! Still on track for a first beta in Q1. Just to give you a feel off what is already working, the following test fixtures in the WatiN.Core.UnitTests assembly do run against IE (7) and FireFox (3.1):

• BaseElementCollectionTest
• ButtonTests
• CheckBoxTests
• DocumentTests (work in progress)
• DivTests
• RadioButtonTests
• SelectListTests
• TestFieldTests

Another very interesting initiative regarding the 2.0 version is taken by Jon Dick. He started last week writing a browser implementation to run tests with HtmlUnit. This is an in memory, no GUI  browser written in Java. Combined with IKVM he already has the google test example running. Since this browser skips rendering it makes the tests run faster which is always a good thing.

I also wondered of a little bit last week and took a look at automating Chrome (the new browser by Google). One option is to use a telnet session to the browser, much like we currently do for the automation of FireFox (using the jssh plug-in). So hopefully after finishing FireFox support, Chrome support will be there very quickly.

WatiN 1.3.1

Although I have created the branch and already merged a lot of the fixes from the trunk, I still need to add the changes I made to the DialogHandlers which do type text in a dialog (like the prompt dialog, file upload dialog and file download dialog). I think it is worth waiting cause this will (finally) fix the hanging of WatiN test in a VPC or closed/minimized remote desktop session. Hope to get this done soon.

WatiN Test Recorder 2.0

Although I don't do any development on WatiN test recorder project (All credits go to Daaron Dwyer!) I know he is busy working on a 2.0 release. So if you have feature request, this is the time to contact him or spam the trackers on sourceforge :-)