I recently upgraded to the NuGet version of IE WebDriver (IEDriverServer.exe). I started noticing that when I ran my tests locally I could no longer browse the internet. I found myself having to go into internet settings to reset my proxy. My first thought was that the new patch I just received from corporate IT may have botched a rule for setting the browser proxy. After going through the dance of running tests, resetting proxy, I got pretty tired and finally came to the realization that it must be the driver and not IT.

First stop was to check Bing for tips on setting proxy for WebDriver. Found lots of great stuff for Java, but no help on .Net. Next, I stumbled upon a log message in the Selenium source change log that said, “Adding type-safe Proxy property to .NET InternetExplorerOptions class.” A quick browse of the source code and I had my solution.

In the code that creates the web driver I added a proxy class set to auto detect.

Proxy proxy = new Proxy();
proxy.IsAutoDetect = true;
proxy.Kind = ProxyKind.AutoDetect;

This sets up a new Proxy that is configured for auto detect. Next, I added 2 properties, Proxy and UsePerProcessProxy to the InternetExporerOptions

var options = new OpenQA.Selenium.IE.InternetExplorerOptions
{
     EnsureCleanSession = true,
     Proxy = proxy,
     UsePerProcessProxy = true
};

Proxy is set the the proxy we previously set up. UsePerProcessProxy tells the driver that we want this configuration to be set per process, NOT GLOBALLY, thank you. Shouldn’t this be the default, I’m just saying. EnsureCleanSession, clears the cache when the driver starts, this is not necessary for the Proxy config and is something I already had set.

Anyway, with this set up all we have to do is feed it to the driver.

var webDriver = new OpenQA.Selenium.IE.InternetExplorerDriver(options);

My test coding life is back to normal, for now.