I learned Selenium (again)

I used it around 7-8 years ago but had to use it again.

I used it in the past for a client, but since then, for my own “little” projects, I have used other tools. I liked WinAutomation. It was pretty simple, yet you could do impressive things in it. Then…Microsoft bought the company to have “only” Power Automate. I tried it several times. I don’t want to lie; I’m using it actively for a few e-mail flows. But there was a lot of stuff that WinAutomation could do, but it’s not available in Power Automate. Of course, it is excellent for most people, but I needed more.

So, after a few weeks of trial and error, I said enough. I’m a developer; let’s do it the “hard way.” I went straightforward for one of the best test automation tools. I was already familiar with a lot of syntaxes, plus after a couple of documentation readings, AI help, etc., I created all of the automation that I needed simply with C# with Selenium.

I even improved many of my old automations, like using SQL Lite for my databases instead of text files. Everything is faster, more reliable, etc.

What kind of automation did I do?

• • Filling up dynamic forms;
  • Searching for buttons and texts;
  • Based on some details on a website, deciding what to do next and potentially save the data;
  • Web crawling based on configuration files and database data;
  • Handling “unexpected” events: popups, failures, issues;

AND THE BEST THING:

• Doing all this automation as humanly as possible so the website won’t detect any automation!!!

In the end, I’m happy with the result – and it proved to me once again that if I can’t find a useful tool, I make my own.