Functional (browser) tests in .NET as first-class citizens

Question

One of the things I like about Grails is that functional tests are first-class citizens of the project. grails test-app knows how to launch a test server and run functional tests, and encourages you to treat the functional tests as equal in status as unit tests and integration tests. This is useful in helping to drive a whole team to be accountable for all forms of tests, rather than isolating browser-based tests in their own separate silo.

How would I set up a .NET project to accomplish something similar? Specific attributes I'm looking for

• browser tests are part of same repo
• browser tests run as part of CI build (Jenkins, Bamboo etc.) with headless browser
• closures to express async wait conditions (e.g., waitFor { condition })
• jQuery style selectors
• developers can run browser tests from Visual Studio as easily as they can run unit tests
• ideally, I can union (add) coverage on server-side classes from browser tests and unit tests, so I can demonstrate I don't need to write unit tests for controllers covered in end-to-end tests. I still need unit tests, but the happy path for "assert controller passed inputs to mock service/DAO" can go away.

Answer 1

You can use Selenium Web Driver and write your tests like unit tests and run them from Visual Studio or any other unit test framework.

Here you have a nice presentation about automated UI tests done right using Selenium also some links where you can find the tools(W3C Working Draft for WebDriver, BDDfy, Seleno, BDD to the rescue) explained in presentation.

I prefer Subcutaneous Test rather than UI test if there is no business logic in Views (which is wrong). You can easily do that using Mvc Contrib.