Dotnet on Selenium

.NET Assemblies Are Now Strongly Signed

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Starting with Selenium 4.44, the Selenium.WebDriver and Selenium.Support NuGet packages ship strongly signed assemblies. The separate Selenium.WebDriver.StrongNamed and Selenium.Support.StrongNamed packages are discontinued.

Why This Matters

Without strong naming on the official packages, any project that itself needed to be strongly signed could not reference Selenium from NuGet. Teams were forced to either forgo strong naming, bundle out-of-band downloads, or use the separate StrongNamed packages with a different assembly name — all of which caused friction, especially in enterprise environments.

InvalidSelectorException has changed

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Before Selenium 4.8.2 in Java and C#, when an invalid locator was used to identify an element, the resulting behavior would be inconsistent in our bindings.

For example, let’s check the following code:

ArrayList<Class<? extends Exception>> expectedExceptions = new ArrayList<>();
 expectedExceptions.add(org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException.class);
 expectedExceptions.add(org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException.class);
 expectedExceptions.add(org.openqa.selenium.ElementNotInteractableException.class);
 expectedExceptions.add(org.openqa.selenium.InvalidElementStateException.class);
 
return new FluentWait<>(driver)
 .withTimeout(Duration.ofMillis(ELEMENT_IDENTIFICATION_TIMEOUT))
 .pollingEvery(Duration.ofMillis(ELEMENT_IDENTIFICATION_POLLING_DELAY))
 .ignoreAll(expectedExceptions)
 .until(nestedDriver -> {
 nestedDriver.findElement(By.xpath("invalid-xpath")).click;
 });

The expected result before this change would be that the driver waits until the timeout expires and then throw an InvalidSelectorException.

BELLATRIX Test Automation Framework for C# and JAVA

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last decade, a large ecosystem of Open Source projects has sprouted up around Selenium. Selenium is often used for automating web applications for testing purposes, but it does not include a testing framework. Nowadays, Selenium Ecosystem initiatives try to give popularity to popular open-source test automation frameworks maintained by people outside of the core Selenium maintainers. One of these frameworks is BELLATRIX, invented by Anton Angelov. It has two versions - C# and Java. A testing framework is an abstraction in which common code provides generic functionality (which can be selectively overridden) for testing different aspects of our applications- UI, API, security, performance, and many others.