One of the most common challenges I come across with users trying to work on developing the .NET language bindings is how to set up an environment on their machine to be able to build the language bindings and get them to build. When I and other committers facilitate the "Fix a Bug, Become a Committer" workshop at various Selenium Conferences, the vast majority of issues we see for people is in setting up their development environment to get the build tools working. Over the last couple of years, the Selenium project has put a fair amount of time and energy into unifying the build syste ..read more

I hope the preceding series of posts has been useful. To wrap things up, I want to share a GitHub repository that contains sample code for each of the items we've discussed. It includes an ASP.NET Core demo web site that implements Basic, Digest, and NTLM authentication. It includes sample Selenium code using BenderProxy (version 1.1.2 or later) and PassedBall (version 1.2.0 or later) to automate the site. The Selenium code runs in a console application, which will await you pressing the Enter key before shutting down the proxy and quitting the browser. This will allow you to see the state of ..read more

I'm very proud to announce the 4.0-alpha2 release of the Selenium .NET bindings! There are several exciting things to look forward to in this release. The first is the fixing of several issues that have cropped up because beginning with version 75, Chrome (and ChromeDriver) now use the W3C WebDriver Specification as the default protocol dialect for communication between Selenium and the driver. This has led to a few issues like the loggingPrefs capability being renamed, and the legacy logging APIs (driver.Manage().Logs) no longer working. This functionality should be restored in this release ..read more

Now that we've created a thorough intellectual framework for how to handle authentication requests using Selenium in combination with a web proxy, and thanks to our last post, we can handle more than Basic authentication, let's take things a step further, and see how you can use Selenium in automating pages secured with NTLM authentication. Before we can do that, though, we need to have an understanding of how NTLM authentication differs from the previous types of authentication we've used before. NTLM authentication is a Microsoft-developed technology, originally implemented in the company's ..read more

In the last post in this series, we saw the general procedure for handling authentication requests with Selenium and a web proxy: Start the programmable proxyStart a Selenium session configuring the browser to use the proxyWire up a method to intercept the 401 Unauthorized responseUse the method to resend the request with the correct Authorization header valueAs we noted previously, the use of the Basic HTTP authentication scheme is rather weak. There are other authentication schemes that don't require the sending of a password in plain text over the wire. One such case is HTTP Digest authenti ..read more

As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, the way to avoid having the browser prompt for credentials while using a Selenium test is by supplying the correct information in the Authorization header. Since Selenium's focus is automating the browser as close to how a user does so as possible, there's not a built-in way to examine or modify the headers. However, Selenium does make it very easy to configure the browser being automated to use a web proxy. A web proxy is a piece of software that stands between your browser and any request made of a web server, and can be made to examine, mo ..read more

In order to understand how to use browser technologies to automate pages that use some form of authentication, it is useful to know what happens when you browse to such a page. What's actually happening when your browser prompts you for some form of credentials, usually a user name and password, before it will let you access a given resource on the web? At the risk of dropping down to a ridiculously low level, let's talk about how browsers transfer data for browsing websites. First, an obligatory disclaimer. I'm going to deliberately gloss over using pages served via secure HTTP ("https"), an ..read more

When you've been using Selenium for UI-based testing by using browser automation as long as I have, you occasionally see questions repeat themselves. Nearly any website of any complexity has functionality that relies on user authentication. Nowadays, that's most often done with some sort of form-based UI, which creates a session that gets tracked by the browser via a cookie. The variations of those are wide, but they don't require any additional tooling to handle via Selenium. However, every now and again, someone will post to one of the Selenium mailing lists or on the IRC/Slack channel aski ..read more

I am very proud to announce the release of the first alpha version of the Selenium 4.0 .NET language bindings! These bindings have been years in the making, and are now available for the first time in alpha form. They are by no means finished, and new features will be available before release. Some things to note about the bindings: The bindings now only support .NET Framework 4.5 and above, and .NET Core 2.0 and above (via .NET Standard). This is to gain support for additional classes in the .NET Framework that are unavailable in previous versions of the framework.The internals of how the bin ..read more