Design Canvas 2.0 Released

12/10/2009 8:30:00 AM

It is official! WebAii 2.0 and Design Canvas 2.0 are released. Since Beta in early November we have fixed over 122 issues reported from our internal testing, our partners and end users. Design Canvas 2.0 and WebAii 2.0 are packed with new features and most importantly first class support for Silverlight record/playback automation.

Download WebAii 2.0 / Design Canvas 2.0 from here.

We are also conducting a joined (free) webinar with Telerik today Dec 10th @ 11:00AM-12:00PM EST, to introduce the new features in Design Canvas 2.0. We will also be giving out a free license to one of the attendees. So sign-up today!

To get familiar with Design Canvas 2.0 new features, please check out our beta post here. Since the beta we have enhanced and added several features to help make recording and playback much more reliable. Some of the key enhancements since the beta:

Silverlight Automation:

Custom Control Support: When DC2.0 detects a custom control on the surface, it now instead of showing the generic list of quick tasks for that control, it will automatically detect the base class that the control inherits from and show the quick tasks for that base control. So for example, if you have MyButton control that inherits from Button, we will automatically show the quick tasks for Button on the surface and codegen against Button instead of FrameworkElement. This is gives customers that have applications that heavily utilize custom controls a richer out-of-box experience.
Playback Reliability: On playback, our execution engine not only waits for an element to be visible, it also waits for the item to stop its animations (Wait.ForNoMotion) which is common in Silverlight as buttons and other UI widgets you are trying to automation fly-in, scroll up or expand (which drive testers crazy!). Further more, if the element is contained in ScrollViewer, we will automatically detected if the element is scrolled into view, and if not, scroll it. Only then, we perform the action.
Smarter ScrollToVisible: This was something we enhanced as per the requirement of #2 above. The ScrollToVisible on FrameworkElement now can detect ScrollViewers and intelligently scroll the item within them to view – including scrolling the browser content if needed.
New Sentence Editor UI: We skinned the sentence editor to match the new 3D View

Expanded property verification for Silverlight objects: You can now verify almost all public properties on your Silverlight control. We will be expand this support to include ALL properties including attached properties in the next update:

Better recording performance in the external browser: In beta the overlay surface was a bit sluggish when run against Silverlight applications. Now, it should be on par with the hosted browser.
Better support for multi-Silverlight app scenarios and app in frames. In beta, we had few issue when an application hosted several Silverlight application islands on the same page or when a Silverlight application was hosted in a sub frame. All these issues are now resolved.
SilverligthApp Connect timeout setting. You now can customize the connect timeout for your Silverlight application depending on its size and time it takes to load. The default settings should work for most applications but if the application take much longer to load then you utilize this settings to extend it.

LockOnSurface: From the DOM Explorer you can now target Silverlight elements and lock them on the browser surface and show the element menu for them. This feature is very useful when try to do validation against an element that is hard to highlight using the mouse on the surface.

General Enhancements

Better text typing recording: In addition to enhanced typing recording, we now record other keys beyond alpha numeric keys.

jQuery selector syntax support: This was a customer feature request and we plan to blog more about it in the near future, but in case you are a jQuery junkie, you can now search the DOM similar to how you would do it in jQuery with a strongly-typed object model in WebAii. Here is a quick example (make sure to import the ArtOfTest.WebAii.jQuery namespace first):