How do you get WatiN to work on Windows Server 2008 with IE8?

Question

My problem is that I cannot get a simple WatiN test to reliably work on my development machine which is running Windows Server 2008 and IE8.

I have seen a couple of good posts on this, but am still having problems. Here are the posts:

• MSDN Testing Article
• Stack Overflow - WatiN Second Method Fails

The steps in the first article seemed to help (comment out "::1" in my hosts file, put my site(s) in trusted sites, and making sure my app.config has "STA" and is set to "copy if newer", but they did not help reliably. I tried the code from the second example hoping that it would help but it did not. I am using WatiN version 2.0 beta 1.

My NUnit code looks like the following:

protected Browser Browser { get; set; }

[TestFixtureSetUp]
public void SetupPriorToTestsInThisFixture()
{
    Browser = new IE();
    Browser.GoTo(Constants.SiteCollectionUrl);
}

[TestFixtureTearDown]
public void TearDownAfterTestsInThisFixture()
{
    if (Browser != null)
    {
        Browser.Dispose();
    }
}

[Test]
public void WaterThroughThePipes()
{
    Link link = Browser.Link(Find.ByText("Calendar"));
    bool exists = link.Exists;
    Assert.That(exists, Is.True, "Could not find 'Calendar' link.");
}

What I'm seeing is that sometimes (albeit rarely) my test passes. Sometimes the assertion fails (exists = false), sometimes I get a timeout when trying to open the browser, and sometimes I get an error trying to access link.Exists.

The error accessing link.Exists looks like:

MyFixture.WaterThroughThePipes: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException : The interface is unknown. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706B5)

I can't seem to reproduce the timeout error now so I can't provide that at the moment (although this used to happen all of the time).

I tend to see different results when running this in debug mode vs. not running in debug mode.

For what it's worth, Firefox 3.0.6 has never worked for me. I'd like it to, but need IE to work regardless. Here is the error I get with Firefox.

MyFixture (TestFixtureSetUp): WatiN.Core.Native.Mozilla.FireFoxException : Unable to connect to jssh server, please make sure you have correctly installed the jssh.xpi plugin ----> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException : No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:9997

Any ideas? I really don't want to go back to Selenium (been there, done that), but I may have to.

Solution 1

Run Visual Studio as Administrator

Solution 2

I was able to get this COM error to go away -- and get my tests running normally -- by adjusting my Internet Security settings to "Enable Protected Mode" even for Local Intranet sites. This single checkbox made all the difference. (And I don't have to run Visual Studio as Administrator.)

See this blog post for fixing this problem without running Visual Studio as Administrator.

Briefly:

In Internet Explorer, open Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Local intranet and check the box "Enable Protected Mode."

I'm running IE 8 and Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7.

Solution 3

IE8 definatley works with WatiN, and has done since the first public release of IE8.

If something is working in debug but not when running it usually points to a timing or Server 2008 security lockdown issue.

You should putting the line that is failing in a try catch, then if there is an exception pause for say half a sec and then re-try again.

Also ensure that you have turned off all the extra server security lockdowns, and are running nUnit as administrator to avoid UAC getting in the way.

Comments

[Greg Bray]

Bingo! I had an System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException was unhandled by user code Message="The interface is unknown. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706B5)" error coming from mshtml.HTMLDocumentClass.IHTMLDocument2_get_url() and running Visual Studio as an Administrator fixed it!

[Ashburton88]

I was running into this problem when running Watin in an Xunit test through TestDriven.net and running VS as administrator fixed it.

[Ikaso]

Running Visual Studio as an Administrator fix the problem while debugging. But if I run my exe as a standard user it fails for the same reason. Is there any solution?

[Ikaso]

We have found out that if we change the Local Intranet zone settings to do not detect local intranet network automatically we can perform our testing without running as administrator. To do so on IE8 go to Tools->Internet Options->Security tab->Local Intranet. Press on the sites button and remove the check box from "Automatically detect intranet network" and that's it.

[dagilleland]

Hm. I found that it worked if I set the "Automatically detect intranet network" check box as checked; when it was un-checked I got the error.

[Bronumski]

This worked perfectly and much nicer than having to run as an administrator as I have had to in the past.

[lstanczyk]

Confirmed. Worked for me on win 2008

[CrazyPyro]

I'm testing on localhost, and security restrictions prevented me from changing the Protected Mode setting on the "Local intranet" zone. But I was able to set up DNS for a .com subdomain that resolved to 127.0.0.1 and the .com in the name was enough to make IE treat it as the "Internet" zone, which already had Protected Mode enabled.