Automated Silverlight Unit Testing Using StatLight

One concern with the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework is that it runs on a UI thread and requires a browser to function. This makes it difficult to integrate into automated or continuous integration testing. Difficult, but not impossible.

A solution is provided by the project called StatLight which not only supports Silverlight testing automation, but actually integrates with several different unit test providers. I am focusing on the Silverlight UT for this post. The program is very flexible and will even run as an continuous test server by watching a XAP file for changes and triggering the tests when it does. It will output to the console and to an XML formatted file, making it easy to grab and process test results.

I decided to run the tests I made in the Unit Testing Asynchronous Behaviors in Silverlight post. First, I headed over to the StatLight web site and downloaded the project. I simply unzipped it into a folder to “install.”

Next, I copied the XAP file for my tests, called PRISMMEF.Tests.xap, into the folder with StatLight (you can reference the full path, this was just for convenience). I created a subdirectory called reports.

I launched a command line as administrator. StatLight launches its own web service so elevated permissions are required to allow it to bind to the appropriate ports. At the command line, I ran the following. It started the test run, placed a dot on my screen for every test run, and then completed.

This resulted in the following output as a file called report.xml:

<StatLightTestResults xapFileName="PRISMMEF.Tests.xap" total="6" ignored="0" failed="0" dateRun="2010-01-08 19:15:18">
  <tests>
    <test name="PRISMMEF.Tests.Common.PartModuleTest.TestConstructor" passed="True" timeToComplete="00:00:00.0290016" />
    <test name="PRISMMEF.Tests.Common.PartModuleTest.TestInitialization" passed="True" timeToComplete="00:00:00.1300074" />
    <test name="PRISMMEF.Tests.Common.ViewModelBehaviorTest.TestAttach" passed="True" timeToComplete="00:00:00.0340020" />
    <test name="PRISMMEF.Tests.Common.ViewModelBehaviorTest.TestFromXaml" passed="True" timeToComplete="00:00:00.1100063" />
    <test name="PRISMMEF.Tests.Common.ViewModelProviderTest.TestConstruction" passed="True" timeToComplete="00:00:00.0630036" />
    <test name="PRISMMEF.Tests.Common.ViewModelProviderTest.TestPropertyChange" passed="True" timeToComplete="00:00:00.0520030" />
  </tests>
</StatLightTestResults>

From this, you can quickly see what I do with my Friday evenings. Seriously, it’s a nice, simply, easy to iterate XML format that I can plug into my build scripts, parse with a program or even use simple XSLT and generate nice automated reports for the results of testing and even fail a build based on failed results.