Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘WebDevelopment’

This is an update to a previous article.

Someone asked (on Twitter) about using WatiN from PowerShell, and pointed to this old post by Scott Hanselman saying he was having the same problems … so I wrote this to help them out:

WatiN requires -STA mode

Note: WatiN requires Single Threaded Apartment mode, so you need to be using PowerShell 2.0 (currently in CTP3) in order for any of this to work, and you need to pass the -STA parameter to PowerShell. Regardless, I thought I’d throw two tips out here:

Don’t use LoadFile, use LoadFrom

I’m not 100% sure when it’s appropriate to use LoadFile in PowerShell, but I can tell you that if your assembly is in a folder with a bunch of other assemblies upon which it depends … you need to use [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom( $path ) instead — because the .net loader will be able to find the dependencies.

Generate some functions to help yourself out

It’s trivial to do code-generation in PowerShell, and WatiN is not friendly to the PowerShell syntax, so you’re going to want to generate a bunch of them. To get you started, here’s a set of Find-* functions to let you find each type of element that WatiN recognizes and automates… by name, id, class, style … well, by any attribute, really: