Test Run: Automate Your ASP.NET Web Services Testing

摘要

It's no exaggeration to say that Web services are revolutionizing application-to-application communication. Web services are already being used extensively in corporate intranet environments and are making their way into commercial use, too. But because Web services are relatively new, techniques to test Web services programmatically are not widely known. In this column I'll show you a technique to quickly write test automation that verifies Web service functionality. The best way to show you what I mean is with two screenshots. Figure 1 shows a simple but representative ASP.NET Web application that uses a Web service. In this case the Web application uses a Web service that searches a proprietary SQL database of hypothetical products. Searching product names for the letter "i" returns four products. Notice the application is rather crude (no formatting of the product price data for example) just as it would be in a pre-production environment—I'm usually testing a system while it's still in development rather than after it's been released.