Design Canvas 2.0 Beta Released!

11/4/2009 3:07:00 PM

We are happy to announce the availability of Design Canvas 2.0 Beta! Design Canvas 2.0 is a major update to our flagship Design Canvas product line and is packed with new features and updates.

Silverlight recording and playback is now fully supported in Design Canvas!!!

Design Canvas 2.0 Beta can be downloaded from here.

We are planning the final release the beginning of December this year. We really want to hear your feedback so we encourage you to share it at our Design Canvas 2.0 forum here.

Watch Getting Started Video here

What’s New in 2.0?

As mentioned, Design Canvas is a major upgrade and contains tons of new features and enhancements. Let’s start by talking about the biggest new feature in Design Canvas 2.0 which is support for Silverlight Automation.

Silverlight Automation:

We’ve spent over a year studying and understanding the usage scenarios for Silverlight automation and the distinct challenges it poses. We tried to address many of these challenges in Design Canvas 2.0 and we know we still have many more that we are actively working on addressing before the final release in December. Here are some of the features that are worth mentioning when it comes to Silverlight automation:

Object Based Recording: All elements that are targets of a specific action/verification or wait operation are abstracted for you and organized under the proper Page/SilverlightApp in the Elements Explorer. Each action is performed against a target and the target has specific find logic that gets generated to be used on playback.

“On Spot” Silverlight Control Detection: Silverlight applications – especially real enterprise applications - have large, complex and deep visual trees. In fact, we found that some Silverlight applications have bigger visual trees than complex Ajax applications. For example, a simply HTML button can be represented as one tag in HTML <input type=”submit” /> but in Silverlight a Button is made out of many mini controls like Paths/Rectangles/TextBlocks…etc. That by itself makes identifying the correct UI control to build validation against a bit more tedious and complex. Design Canvas 2.0 offers UI cues using what we call “fans” that allow you to visually identify what element you have under the mouse and what logical controls this element is part of in order or containment.

Integrated Visual Tree Explorer: The DOM Explorer can now show both your HTML page DOM and your Silverlight application Visual Tree. Furthermore, you can set the root of the DOM Explorer to be the Silverlight application if you do not care about the HTML portion of the page. That is probably the case for customers building 100% Silverlight LOB applications. The DOM Explorer is also hooked to the highlighting surface and vice-versa.

Built-in translators for all out-of-box Silverlight controls: We have custom translators built for all the built-in controls (common & complex) that Microsoft ships out of box for Silverlight development. The translators offer tailored recording experience for each control. We also have future plans (post 2.0) to support the Silverlight Control Toolkit that Microsoft ships too.

These are just a few of the main highlights of our Silverlight recording support.

NEW Interactive HIGHLIGHTING SURFACE

The new highlighting surface in Design Canvas 2.0 is designed to allow for a more intuitive and richer user experience right on top of the target application you testing.

- Drag elements directly from the page to locate in the DOM or add to the project elements:

- New simple and easy to use “Element Menu”

- Rich Drag & Drop recording experience:

New 3D Element View

Accessed through the verifications menu, this new feature allows users to dissect the DOM hierarchy and target a specific element using a new 3D visualizer. This feature is extremely important when building Silverlight or HTML automation in real-world applications that have complex DOM or Visual Trees. Furthermore, the UI allows you to build all sorts of verifications against the targeted element with just few clicks.

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