I accidentally agreed to give a talk later this month. The subject is IronRuby and it’s application in the .NET ecosystem. Seems simple enough. So, to jazz things up, I want to have a host of demo applications. This is about one.

A while back, I posted an article with an example of using IronRuby and the White framework. In it, I appear to have made a promise.

I’ll get to Cucumber. I’ll publish examples. I promise.

I’m writing this in response to a recent post I wrote on my website, A Ruby Cast In Steel. While I appreciated the insight my experiments gave me into both IronRuby and WPF, the author ended up with a few conclusions I’d like me to revisit.

One of the first examples of using IronRuby on the web, possibly the first since it was the announcement of the project, was Scott Guthrie announcing the project and using WPF way back in 2007.

We’ve come a long way since then. But that’s all been internal to IronRuby. In addition, I’ve not seen the community truly embrace IronRuby as it has had some growing pains. I don’t mean to dis those working on the project, just look at my non-existent commit log to see how much of a leg I have to stand on if I where to dis them. I mean to say that I’ve not seen many people talking about using it in production. And until we see production IronRuby, we won’t be able to tell the wider .NET world how awesome working in ruby really is.

Confession, this is the album where I stopped listening to REM. Dunno why, because Monster was one of the best albums I never bought.

Let us review our strategy, especially referencing our usage of White. I find it interesting that Test Complete makes it so hard to “do the right thing” as propounded by both Scripting GUI Tests in Ruby and by White. And just what is that?

The responsibility of the test script is to

• perform a series of actions and verifications.
• allow someone to read the script and understand what the hell is going on.

I’ve been continuing my exploration of IronRuby and White for gui testing. I expected to deal with Automation IDs first, but I’ll get back to that. For now I’m tying IronRuby to White, and handling generics.

My install of white is not in the GAC, so I’ll be requireing DLLs from a directory. DLLs are looked for in ruby’s $LOAD_PATH, just like ruby libraries. It’s an array. You’ll notice that White suggests also including an NUnit dll, but I’ve not needed that with RSpec. And, I want to shorten the namespace stuff. So let’s start with white.rb and we’ll add to it later.

white_loc = "C:\\Projects\\Libs\\White_Bin_0.18"
$LOAD_PATH.push(white_loc)
require "White.Core.dll"
Application = Core::Application

I’m currently involved with a WPF project as a tester.  My charge is to automate the System-Level testing of this project for my client.  Our belife is that automated testing allows us to find “popup bugs” before they become a problem.  This has worked well, in combination with the team doing a degree of dog-fooding.  They catch the esoteric things, I find the simple things no one looks for.  Also, I’m currently working with a lot of them as we build manual test scripts for our verification phase.  This is a lot more focused act that, once automated as we move forward with version two, will allow us to have a better understanding of the “shipability” of our software.  We’re regulated and we want to automate most of the acceptance testing, at least in theory.