June 30, 2017 Update – Selenium AND .NET Core 2.0 Preview 2 – it works!

I blogged about Selenium support for .NET Core in November last year (2016) and its been one of my most popular posts to date so I thought it warranted an update.

The Bad News

The short story is the Selenium core team wasn’t ready to add support for .NET Core, at the time, until the build tools were finalized with VS2017. Version 1.0 of these tools were released on March 7, 2017. Unfortunately, the Selenium core team has other priorities that prevent them for accepting Frederik’s (@qmfrederik) pull request and adding official support for .NET Core. Here is Jim’s statement from the PR thread:

If you’re asking if this feature is desired, the answer is yes. I will not be discussing a timeframe for its availability, at least not for the next few weeks. I have many other obligations, some relating to Selenium (like a concentrated push for W3C spec compliance), some not, that are pressing during that period. These obligations prevent me from, among other things, exploring whether the enhanced tooling options of VS17 will allow the project build process to produce a consumable artifact using .NET Core (Release Candidate versions of that tooling indicated that it will be more difficult with the new build tools to build the .NET bindings under that system than before, implying a build system overhaul will be required).

The Good News

Frederik has updated his PR and Nuget package to the latest Selenium version at the request of another community member.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/CoreCompat.Selenium.WebDriver/3.4.0-beta001

This is a completely viable solution until official support is provided. My blog post from November provides a walkthrough of setting it up.

The Bottom Line

Selenium is a great tool, .NET Core is new and official support is important but may take some more time. We have a workaround in the short term thanks to the Frederik and the larger community. Open source works!

You can show your support for the feature on the PR page with a thumbs up or a comment but please be respectful and kind. Trolling the core team doesn’t help. We all have conflicting priorities that must be addressed but in the end I hope we all want to help each other.

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pull/2269

Happy Testing!