how to test winforms applications

Question

Our.NET application is based on Winforms. The application controls different instruments and most of the behavior is nicely stubbed to enable unit testing. One thing we come across many times is problems caused by (wrongly using) the GUI. Wrongly handling a controls event or accidentally selecting an item in a listbox that is not there. This would be the example I would like to have some help with:

We have a gridcontrol that users use to select an item. When the user selects a certain item, this should update the 'activeItem' in our model. Now we found out that there was a bug in here, since when the user used a shortcut to select the last item in the gridcontrol, it did not update the control. Of course this is caused by errors we make in the programming, but how could I test this GUI behavior. So that we are sure, if somebody changes the gridcontrol, it still works as expected. Could this be done with normal Unit Testing, or am I getting it completely wrong?

Thanks,

Erik

Answer 1

In our software we have some unit tests which instantiate the forms and perform actions on them and then then check the state of the model if it conforms to the expectations. So in that regards - yes you can do it with unit tests. However we also found it's easy to break those tests by changing the UI around and can involve quite a bit of maintenance. There are automated test frameworks around there which can make your life easier. I have had a brief look at White and NUnitForms but haven't done much with them yet. Feel free to share your experience.