Develop Reference

wpf automated tests, current state

I know the question comes up every now and then. But because it hasn't been considered for a long time, I would like to ask it again. What would you recommend to create and run automated tests of a WPF application? Recording would be good too, of course, but it is not mandatory. Can you recommend something?

Besides the possible automation bots - or better: UI testing by code - I actually haven't been working on that lately. So, therefore, I would like to approach this from a slightly different angle: How to test a WPF application?
In general; your testing capabilities - well, actually the ease of it - depend on how the program is structured.
Some examples:
Dependency Injection: works very well in combination with unit tests.
The MVVM pattern (suited for WPF): works very well with Dependency Injection and Unit Tests - And allows to isolate UI tests.
Separation of layers - quite obvious, but often forgotten
Of course there are also test concepts to take into account:
Unit tests
Integration test
Consumer Contract tests
UI tests
End to end test.
My guess is, you're referring to a tool to do the UI testing, as I said, it has been a while, so I can't give you an answer there - but what I can give you: good test-ability depends on a well defined architecture.
Here's something on UWP; I am pretty sure there was something similar for WPF: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/test/test-uwp-app-with-coded-ui-test?view=vs-2019
I hope this helps.

Take a look at Appium and WinAppDriver. It's a platform to test Web apps, mobile apps and desktop apps using the same API.
I have used Specflow together with Appium to do UI testing in a recent project.
If you want to go for UI testing using recording (no coding required) there a multiple options. Haven't used any of them, but there is: Microfocus Silk, SmartBear TestComplete and many more.
Some of these tools also provide you with Test Case Management as well.

Unit Test existing UI code

I was browsing for a while the internet and this site and instead of finding some ways to unit test my existing code the only finding was to separate logic and interaction with the user (MVC approach). Although this is great for new projects it is time-consuming and as a result too expensive to invest for existing ones. Is there a way to create specific unit tests, ideally automated, for existing GUI projects that unfortunately connect directly to databases or other systems to get data and the data are manipulated before it is shown? Currently we have two projects the one being MFC, the other C# .net 2.0 Thanks a lot.

Unit testing won't cut in here considering you can't change your existing code (not to mention you don't really unit test UI). You should look for some kind of GUI testing automation/scripting tools. Like Sikuli. Quoting literally the first paragraph from their website:
Sikuli is a visual technology to automate and test graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots).
It doesn't get any simplier than that. You "tell" the tool which parts of your UI it should observe/interact, it records and replays it. Skimming through this presentation will give you idea of what exactly you can do (might also check their video). Probably won't solve all your problems, but might be alternative worth considering.

Unit testing an already existing project is always a challenge. however i point you to some open source tools that will help you to automate unit testing
C++
Boost unit test framework
Google Mock
C#
NUnit
NMock

It is possible to produce some level of automated testing, but not unit tests.
Unit tests, by definition, test small units of logic decoupled from the system as a whole. I'd recommend new code be written in the way you described (mvc etc) to be unit testable.
With your existing code, unit testing will obviously require refactoring, which I appreciate is not in your timeframe. You will need to work with what you've got an look at a way to perform more whole-system automated testing, probably driven through the UI. The fact these are not Unit tests is by-the-by, there are helpful tests to have even if you have unit tests. Its helpful to know the distinction though when you are searching for resources.
You are probably best searching for automated ui testing. With the .net apps, you may find something like White useful

If you are lucky enough to have a Premium (at least) version of Visual Studio 2010, then you could consider writing Coded UI Tests.
A UI Test is basically an automated sequence of actions (mouse, keyboard...) on a GUI. These are very high level tests (or functional tests), not unit tests, but it can help testing a GUI application that is already existing.
For instance you can easily automate CRUD actions (which imply a database) and check (assert) that actions have produce the expected result in the UI (new created item in a list...).

Write UI testing can be very time consuming because there are various aspect you had to test. Thanks God there are a lot of frameworks to achieve that result but you always have to write some code.
I assume you already did unit testing (Visual Studio itself comes with a not so bad unit test framework) so what you want to check is not algorithms but UI automation/results. What does it mean? Everything that is code must be tested by code (database operations and algorithms, for example). Even some UI controls can be somehow tested by code (example: if I simulate a user click I'll get that event fired when this condition is true). Trust me, UI testing is Black Art and often you'll get failed tests even if everything is OK.
Simple stress scenario
For a simple scenario, for example to stress your application to reproduce a bug repeating the same operation many times, you can use a macro recorder (such as WinMacro). You register user inputs and then you run that macro in a loop. If there's a subtle bug you have many chances to reproduce (and/or to find) it when that actions are repeated 5000 times in a night. That done you'll get data from your logs.
Simple scenario
If your application can be somehow automated (it may be easy for .NET application using VSA) you can prepare some "good" macro to automate an operation, put results in a file and compare them with a known good results data file.
Simple tip: for MFC application you can write your own "macro" with a text file where each line is a Windows message with its parameter; read it, parse it and SendMessage() them to your application to simulate user inputs, menu clicks and so on. Grab - for example - text box value and compare with something known. WinSpy++ is your friend.
Complex scenario
For anything else (is my custom control drawing everything in the right way? when user click that button then UI colors changes?) you have to use a more complex tool. There are several tools to automate UI testing, built-in in Visual Studio 2010 (not in every edition) what you need to create coded UI tests. What does it mean? You write code to automate your application and then you write more code to check its results (sometimes even comparing bitmaps with known results. It may be tedious and a lot but virtually you can test everything, even if the application hasn't been designed for UI testing.
Start reading this from MSDN.
There is a plethora of commercial tools too (even if I never used it in any project) so I not write any link, I guess you'll have a lot of results in Google.

Mocking is usually the best approach for simulating integration points, but unfortunately most Mocking frameworks fall short if the code is too interconnected and bury dependencies in private methods etc.
It might be worth looking into a framework called Moles (made by Microsoft) that have very few limitations for what you can Mock. It even handles private methods!
Perhaps you could use it to mock your db calls to test your data manipulation?
There are several tutorials online.
Here's one that might get you started:
http://www.unit-testing.net/CurrentArticle/How-To-Mock-Code-Dependencies-Using-Moles.html

HP Quick Test Professional + ASP.NET (possible?)

I work for big company on a quite big project in ASP.NET.
Our supervisors decided that our application need automated tests and they chose
HP Quick Test Professional tool. I have bad feelings about it. Has anyone ever used that tool to test ASP.NET pages? IS it good choice? Do we need any additional tool/addin? Can we use that tool without implementing MVP (or MVC) pattern? I know there are NUnit,XUnit etc. but most of them are prohibited in our company (don't ask why).

A larger question would be what you are hoping to obtain from the testing. HP Quicktest Pro is usually used to automate regression or UI input testing, while NUnit, XUnit, and the like are used to create more focused unit tests, usually revolving around functionality.
Since you are referring to testing ASP.NET pages, I presume you are thinking of automating regression and/or UI testing. In this case, you don't need to implement MVP/MVC, but it helps. HP Quicktest is well designed for this setup and you can use the UI to set up tests quickly. On the other hand, you do not explicitly need it like that. You may use the Expert View and use VBScript to generally do whatever you please from a testing standpoint.
As for whether or not it's a good choice, that very much depends on your company's situation. At the end of the day, nothing can replace a properly executed regression script done by a warm-blooded human, and if management or the executives at your company don't fully understand that you may get into a situation where they will attempt to replace or subvert human QA, which will be a disaster for everyone involved (voice of experience). If the higher ups understand the limitations of the software, it can be pretty helpful. I would not expect it to change your life for the better, but it can be useful to prevent bugs from ever making it out of the dev environment, which can happen a lot if your shop is heavy with junior programmers.

Unit testing a 'legacy' WPF Application

The product I have been working on has been in development for the past six years. It started as a generic data entry portal into an insanely complex part WPF/part legacy application. The system has been developed for all these years without a single Unit test in its fold. Now, the point has been raised for a comprehensive unit testing framework. I have been recruited recently to work on this product and have been tasked to get the 'Testing' in order. Since the team that worked on the product for the last six years adopted 'Agile', the project lacks any documentation of the business rules or any design documents.
I have been trying to write unit tests for some of the modules. But I am not sure what to Mock, how to setup my Test fixture and eventually what to Test for, since a casual glance of the methods does not reveal its intentions. Also, it has come to my attention that the code was not developed with a particular methodology in mind.
Given the situation, I was wondering if the good people of Stackoverflow could provide me with some advise on how to salvage this situation. I have heard about the book 'Working with Legacy Code' that has something to say about this general situation but I was thinking about getting some pointers from individuals who have encountered similar situations within the technology stack(C#,VB,C++,.NET 3.5,WCF,SQL Server 2005).

In my opinion the best way is to start by "stabilizing" the current code functionallity using integration tests. Try to create tests that has start point which is not likely to change later. Using the integration tests you can gain confidence that refactoring that'll come later for the unit tests are not breaking anything.
The next step is to unit test the code. If you're free to refactor the code you can start separating logic to classes (e.g. extra logic in view layer) and add unit tests to them. Using this process you also get to know better the code of the product.
It is very recommended read Working with Legacy Code, many of the problems you're going to encounter already have solutions :)
Unit testing legacy code can be a challenge sometimes, depending on the existing code and on how much you can change the code. You can use some tools, for example for writing integration tests you can use White framework to automate the GUI. Another tool you can use for writing the unit tests without forcing major changes in the code is Typemock Isolator (disclaimer - I work at Typemock), it allows faking most of dependencies without changing the production code. There are many other tools which can ease the process, try to find and make best use of them :)

#sc_ray: I know this may sound pretty obvious, but I believe before you start writing tests against the existing code base, you should focus on making sure you are using an MVVM approach when interacting with your UI. Being a legacy app does not mean you have code updating the UI directly with if statements, but the older the project the easier it is for people to bypass more modern software development styles. All I'm saying is that I would make sure I am optimizing the use of binding, commanding, and all the wonderful infrastructure facilities WPF provides. Otherwise important pieces of your business logic would not be able to be tested and you could be potentially writing tests against less relevant code...

.NET testing framework advice

I'm looking to introduce a unit testing framework into the mix at my job. We're using Visual Studio 2005 (though we may be moving to 2008 within the next six months) and work primarily in C#. If the framework has some kind of IDE integration that would be best, but I'm open to frameworks that don't have integration but are still relatively simple to get set up. I'm going to get resistance to it one way or another, so if I can make sure what I'm pushing isn't a pain in the neck, that would help my case.
The obvious choice from the research I've done so far points to NUnit, but I'd like to get the impressions of someone who's actually used it before recommending it to my team.
Has anyone out there used NUnit? If so, are there any pitfalls or limitations of which I should be aware? Are there other good options out there? If so, if you've used both NUnit at that, I'd greatly appreciate an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of them.

I think NUnit is your best bet. With TestDriven.NET, you get great integration within Visual Studio. (ReSharper also has a unit test runner if you're using it). NUnit is simple to use and follows an established paradigm. You'll also find plenty of projects, tutorials, and guides using it which always helps.
Your other main choice is probably MbUnit, which is more and more positioning itself as the BDD framework of choice (in conjunction with Gallio).

Scott Hanselman had a good podcast about this, entitled:
"The Past, Present and Future of .NET Unit Testing Frameworks"
:
Hanselminutes #112

Visual Studio 2008 has a built-in test project type that works in a similar way to NUnit, but obviously has much tighter integration with Visual Studio (can run on every build and shows the results in a similar way to the conversion results page when upgrading solution files), but it is obviously not as mature as NUnit as it's pretty new and I'm not sure about how it handles mocking.
But it would be worth looking into when your team moves to Visual Studio 2008.

The built-in unit testing in Visual Studio 2008 is all right, but its difficult to integrate with CruiseControl.NET, certainly a lot harder than normal NUnit.
So go with NUnit if you plan to have nice automated tests.

We've been using xUnit.net. It seems to combine all the best of NUnit, MbUnit, and MSTest.

When I started unit testing, I started with NUnit as it is simple to set up and use. Currently I am using the built-in test runner that comes with ReSharper. That way, I can easily flip between code and test results.
Incidentally, NUnit detects when you have compiled your code, so you do not need to do any refresh in NUnit. ReSharper automatically does a build when you choose to run a specific test.

Try also the PEX tool.
It's Microsoft's own, probably soon to be integrated into VSTS.
It does support NUnit, MbUnit and xUnit.net.
I also use a small console application for testing one class or a small library. You could copy paste the code from here.

VSTT 2010 (Visual Studio Team System Test) should be a good bet if you are looking for functional test automation. Web services testing, UI testing, BizTalk testing and data-driven testing support. Please look at VSTT.

MbUnit is worth a look. It has a set of features comparable to NUnit. It has its own GUI, or can be integrated into Visual Studio if you have ReSharper. I would also recommend Rhino Mocks if you are doing any sort of TDD.

I would say MbUnit also. I like being able to run a single test many times just by specifying inputs and the result is right above the test function. It is a horrible description of what I mean, so here is a link that shows you what I mean.