Unit Testing WPF Bindings - BindingFinder

It’s time for a second attempt at testing the bindings on a WPF window. I don’t think my first attempt was a complete failure but, I am sure there must be a better way to solve this problem. Back to the internet to see what else is out there.

After some digging around, I found a little utility application, called “BindingFinder”, written by Rob Reylea. The source code is can be downloaded from his blog (http://blogs.windowsclient.net/rob_relyea/ ). At first glance it looks like the code opens a Xaml file and scans the contents for bindings. What I like about this is the fact that you won’t have to create a window and open it to get the bindings. I am not mad about opening windows during a unit test as it introduces a number of other problems to consider:

• How to handle threading differences between the unit test runner and the WPF application
• How to run the tests in a continuous integration environment

The original snippet of code on Rob’s blog that got me interested has turned into something bigger and more complicated in the “BindingFinder” utility. After having a play around with the code, I have decided that although this was a promising lead it would probably require a fair amount of effort to get what I wanted out of the code and would also introduce dependencies on file paths etc. I think I am going to leave this code for the time being and see what else is out there.