UI Automation and Unit Testing

A few months ago, I was reading Adam Nathan's book, Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed, learning about WPF. He had an interesting side note in the chapter on custom controls that mentioned designing custom controls to support UI Automation. Intrigued, I decided to dive a little deeper into UI Automation, a topic on which I knew nothing.

As I began learning more about how elements can be controlled through Microsoft's UI Automation framework, I realized that UI Automation could also be used in unit testing for UI components. Along those lines, I recently had an article published on DevSource titled Introduction to UI Unit Testing with UI Automation. In the article, I use a couple of simple applications to show how you can design unit tests to manipulate the user interface.

Overall, I found UI Automation not that complicated to use. The key was understanding the elements and control patterns. In the end, I came away with another tool to use in testing applications.