I guess I don't need the web browser, since network capabilities are built into the stand-alone player. I just need some kind of .NET component which will allow me to programatically start hundreds of flash players (with no UI) playing a specific SWF file for load testing purposes. The SWF file accesses a network service and downloads other SWF files, but basically runs on its own to completion once loaded into the player.
It would be nice if such a component would also allow me to detect when it is no longer accessing the network for a period of time or receive a message indicating that the SWF has finished its work, at which point I would terminate that instance of the flash player and start up a new one.
Perhaps I could use the existing flash player, but I don't want to actually start a player with a UI, I basically need to program a player with no UI, because if I'm going to be running hundreds of them on one machine, I don't need the overhead of actually rendering all the graphics. I will probably have this running on multiple machines as a distributed application.
Any thoughts?
If you need real browsers (which all have Flash 10 installed), check out my company, BrowserMob. It effectively does "Selenium load testing". A lot of our customers do Flash automation using our service and it is a LOT easier than traditional protocol-level load testing.