Using Microsoft's Visual UI Automation Verify

Question

I'm doing my first steps in automated QA, doing a UI automation for a WPF app. After a long research I figured the best tool for the task is TestStack.White. I'm stuck at the stage of identifying the type of ui element on which I want to perform. Some were easy to find and some weren't. I've read about a tool by MS, Visual UIA Verify, which should be a part of Windows SDK. I have SDK installed, but I don't have VUIAV. So my questions are:

1. Is UIA verify indeed the right tool for the job?
2. How should I use it? I tried downloading from this link, but still couldn't get it to work. I did a lot of googling before posting, with no real answer.

I'm working with VS 2015, on a machine running Win7 pro 64bit, if it matters.

Thanks,

Tal

Answer 1

I recomend using Inspect.exe (also part of Windows SDK) instead of VUIAV, it is faster and has more options, like using ms accesibility not only automation (ss attached)

the path in my installation is C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\bin\x64\inspect.exe

Answer 2

1) Yes UIA verify is ok for this.

UIA Verify 1.0 and UISpy use the original managed API.

UIA Verify 2.0 uses the newer native COM UIA library that was released in the UIA 3.0 update alongside Windows 7.

Answer 3

As was said above it comes together with Windows SDK. And personally for me the path to it is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\x64\UIAVerify\VisualUIAVerifyNative.exe

Also I can find it here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\x64\inspect.exe

But it's a little bit different tool.

Compare inspect.exe:

With VisualUIAVerifyNative.exe: