State of WinAppDriver

[kat-y]

Hi everyone, I (@kat-y) am the new Program Manager for WinAppDriver, so please feel free to direct your questions and concerns my way. I’d like to address the limbo and uncertainty around WinAppDriver – much of this is due to an internal transition of WinAppDriver ownership within the company, where it recently moved closer to the team that owns and supports our modern native Windows UI frameworks. This transition is complete, and WinAppDriver now lives with the same team that owns WinUI, WPF, React Native for Windows + macOS, and other products such as the Windows Terminal.

Presently, the team’s focus is on these aforementioned UI Frameworks. This means that, for the next ~6+ months, WinAppDriver development will remain paused. In the interim, we’ll be working in the repo with the community to construct an execution plan for when we do bring dev resources back to WinAppDriver.

Also, as I’ve been ramping up, I’ve taken notice at the many requests for WinAppDriver to be open-sourced. Open sourcing is a lot like any feature we’d consider adding to WinAppDriver: it takes resources to do it since we have to ensure the code is free of private APIs, represents modern OSS standards for Microsoft, has processes & license agreements properly reviewed by our legal team, etc. So ‘going open source’ is definitely on the list of things for the future of WinAppDriver, but this will also have to wait until we can apply more resources to the project in general. I’m looking forward to when we’ll be able to do that.

If you have any questions about what I wrote above, or about WinAppDriver in general, please reach out and ask. Thanks, I’m excited to have a chance to work with this great community!

Please note that a more recent update is #1150

[444ghost]

Hello,

I hope you do your best to bring back the dev resources to WinAppDriver asap. It seems like there's a memory-leak-related bug in WinAppDriver which I think it's very critical, and it has been around for almost 2 years but has not been knocked out.

#991

Thanks.

[oren451]

Hi @kat-y!
Joining other users hopes WAD returns to be under dev.
A lot of product refinements need to go through to be the next thing, here some examples:

• Improve by far WAD finding element algorithms speed
• Many bugs, some critical to fix
• Create sessions over HWND of not top-level screens
• Extend the supported API
• Insert UI Automation API to WAD API (Instead using getAttribute('LegacyIAccessible.State')
• WinAppDriver need to be open-sourced
• Supporting also Java UI technologies
• Supporting ActiveX elements

Thanks and Good Luck!

[Daniwin82]

thanks for the update

[anunay1]

I have around 200 test cases implemented with WAD, but off late I am started observing after running for 3 to 4 hours the send keys API starts behaving weirdly, the API is not disposed properly even after driver.quit. its starts sending weird characters.

[anunay1]

Also it will be good to have logs with time stamp as the console logs are not very helpful.

[Wolfe1]

Thanks for the update, hope to see resources here soon!

I would suggest running through the open pull requests and merging the ones that still make sense to start cleaning up this github. The issues tab will be its own beast 😟

[mattboroi]

@kat-y, looking for information regarding the publicly available Microsoft.WinAppDriver.Appium.WebDriver NuGet package.

• What are the similarities and differences between the Microsoft.WinAppDriver.Appium.WebDriver NuGet package and WinAppDriver released on GitHub?
• Are there plans for a WinAppDriver NuGet package that reflects the latest release on GitHub?

I did attempt to research open/closed GitHub issues and the Wiki/FAQ although I had not come across information regarding when or how to use the NuGet package verse installing the GitHub release.

Any information would be greatly appreciated and I'm very excited about all the recent activity behind this project and what it will produce for the community.

[varun210619]

Hi @kat-y
Really good to see WinAppDriver is up and running. Hope there will be many enhancements to the tool in near future.

Could you please look into below issues-

#507
I work in Nordic company and we work on Danish, Swedish, Finnish keyboards.
When I send keys with value XXX-XX, winappdriver prints XXX+XX. Although there are many workarounds for typing correct required values, but please see if you can priotize it.

#1357
My automation scripts contains many steps and sometimes I am required to use xpath.
To validate any relative xpath, i have to execute whole script till the step where xpath is used. This consumes lot of time.
Is it possible to create additional utility on top of winappdriver, where i just enter my xpath and tool highlights that element or provide an error.
I am looking for utility similar console provided in chrome where i can enter xpath and css to validate in web application.

#1378
I am finding winappdriver performance very slow. It takes a long time in step execution where xpath is used or where any table/grids appear.
Even with tree views, it is very slow in execution.

#1361
LegacyAccessible.Value attribute not working in winappdriver. No LegacyAccessible properties work with winappdriver.
Sometimes, this is the only property to be used uniquely, but due to this issue, it becomes a bottleneck.

#975
Fortunately i was able to get the developer settings enabled in my company, but it could be a show stopper or delay in getting these settings.

#1103
You may close this one since WinAppDriver is up and alive :)

More enhancements but i have not opened any issues for these -
I dont want to launch winappdriver.exe manually or even in the code. Is it possible that WindowsDriver itself deals with this whenever WinDowsDriver object is created.

[HenningL]

Highest priority for me would be the issue with processId not found. It seems for me that this is a general windows problem which might get compensated whith some internal knowledge. I recognized for some application (e.g. calc.exe) that even if i start the ".exe" programmatically and retrive the pid , when i insepect or watch tasklist, this pid doesnt even exist anywhere. The binding pid to session is the biggest hurdle to even start with WAD.