Silverlight Windowed Vs. Windowless : General Questions

[Ciege]

I know currently the requirement for Ranorex to work with Silverlight is currently in windowed mode only.

Is there any plan to also support windowless Silverlight in the near/far future?

We are looking into some new Silverlight development and the powers that be are staring right in the eyes of windowless. Although I am trying to dissuade that due to Ranorex limitations, but I don't know if that is enough of a reason for them.

Thanks!

[Support Team]

Is there any plan to also support windowless Silverlight in the near/far future?

There is a plan to improve support for WPF applications by adding a Ranorex plugin that does not depend on WPF UI Automation, but uses the WPF internal visual/logical tree. This would help for windowless Silverlight applications, too; the Silverlight security concept could be a problem, but I'm pretty sure we can somehow bypass it

The bad news is that a beta version of that plugin is unlikely to be released before the end of 2010...

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Support Team

[Ciege]

Well, that's good news to look forward to.
Considering we are only starting the initial PRD phase of our initial dive into the world of Silverlight I don't really expect we will need much in the way of automation until late 2010 or into 2011 so your timeframe might not be too bad for me.
Thanks for the information!

[Ciege]

Just to put a little fuel on the fire...

It seems, after doing some quick investigation on the web, that there really isn't a "good" automation toolset to do any windowless Silverlight automated testing short of doing image based automation.

That being said there seems to be a pretty significant amount of people clamoring for a tool to do windowless Silverlight automated testing. I would think it might make sense for you guys to put a little more effort in to getting this working for Ranorex sooner rather than later. Since none of the players out there (including the big guys) have an automated solution for this it could certainly help move Ranorex into the limelight if you came out with a solution for this problem before the others.

Just food for thought...