Friday, April 19, 2019

Announcing Selenium 4.0 Alpha .NET Bindings

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 bindings communicate with the browser drivers has been completely rewritten to use System.Net.Http.HttpClient. I'm sure that something in this conversion has been missed, so there needs to be thorough testing of this.
  • The bindings now only support the W3C WebDriver Specification dialect of the wire protocol. This simplifies the code for the .NET bindings considerably.
  • Methods and classes that were marked with the Obsolete attribute in 3.141 of the .NET bindings have been fully removed. This includes the ExpectedConditions and PageFactory classes. If you want to continue to use those structures, the DotNetSeleniumExtras packages will be updated for the final release.
The complete list of changes is listed in the bindings' CHANGELOG. Please download and try out the bindings, and send your feedback. If you run into issues, you can file a new issue in the issue tracker at the Selenium project GitHub repository or you can contact me via Twitter (@jimevansmusic) or on the Selenium project's IRC or Slack channel. Happy automating!