Learn Selenium (a Test Automation Tool) with C# - Part 1

Selenium is a set of different software tools each with a different approach to supporting test automation. You can read more about Selenium via its website: http://www.seleniumhq.org/docs/01_introducing_selenium.jsp#introducing-selenium

Selenium has 2 version 1.0 and 2.0. During this article, I just mention about Selenium 2.0. Basically, it is used for testing web application by automation program written by Java, C#, Python... To do that, the test application (created by a tester) will control the browser which the web application (need to be tested) runs on via Selenium webdriver. The browser can be Chrome, FireFox, Internet Explorer... Each browser has a corresponding webdriver to control it.

In this post, I want to introduce Selenium with C#. To start, you must install MS Visual Studio - MSSV (2015 community is preferred) and download Selenium client & webdriver. Below are steps to create

1. Open MSVS and create new C# Windows project, see the following picture for example:

2. Add references for Selenium client & webdriver. There are 2 ways.
     2.1 Use Add Reference menu:

     2.2 Use Manage NuGet Packages menu:

I prefer 2.1 way. If you use Chrome Webdriver, you need to download the latest version from: http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html and unpack it into your project folder. Now you can create a simple test application.

3. Code your test application. Below is simple code for opening Chrome with google.com website
using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
namespace SeleniumTutorial
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            IWebDriver wd = new ChromeDriver(@"E:\working\abc\SeleniumTutorial");
            wd.Url = "http://google.com";
        }
    }
}

In which, @"E:\working\abc\SeleniumTutorial" is the folder containing Chrome Webdriver (chromedriver.exe).

Yeah! We already knew how to start a C# project with Selenium. I think that's enough for Part 1. In Part 2, we will learn more details how to code a test application with some real test scenarios, for example how to login Facebook automatically.

Any comment is welcome. Have a great day!