title: Third Party WPF suites w/ Automated/Coded UI Testing
body: <p>My team is diving headfirst into a new project and we are taking the opportunity to bring ourselves up to date with Scrum methodology, new technology etc. Part of this involves trying to automate our QA process, using both Microsoft Test Manager and VS2010 Coded UI tests.</p>
  
  <p>However, we are having problems getting the automated test playback to work with our currently-selected WPF control library, the DevExpress XPF suite. We've been using DevExpress for their WinForms and ASP.NET controls for years now, but this is our first experience with their WPF controls, and with automated UI tests, and the two don't seem to work well together.</p>
  
  <p>In particular, trying to play back a recorded test that interacts with a grid control never works right, and even on simple controls the playback seems to get confused over which editor it should be interacting with. In the action recordings our test lead is generating from MTM I see a lot of this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Type '5236' in 'PART_Editor' text box
  Type '253' in 'PART_Editor' text box
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And even worse, inside of the grids:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Click 'FooterPanel' pane 
  Last action on list item was not recorded because the control does not have any good identification property.
  Click 'FooterPanel' pane
  Click 'Item: CashEntry, Column ...' custom control 
  Move 'Item: CashEntry, Column ...' custom control from (141,     10) to 'Item: CashEntry, Column ...' custom control (5, 11) 
  Type '{NumPad8}{Down}{NumPad5}{NumPad0}{Up}{Down}{Down}' in 'CashEntry' window
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now, I have seen plenty of chatter on DevX's forums about their WinForms controls not supporting MSAA well enough for coded UI tests to work, but I thought that WPF used a different mechanism for automated UI testing that was supposed to work better. So, my questions are:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is there a way to get the DevX XPF controls to work better with coded/automated UI tests?</li>
  <li>If not, is there an alternative XPF control suite that is known to work well with coded/automated UI tests?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I'm specifically interested in a grid-like component with sorting, grouping, etc., a navbar-like component, and custom editors (dates, numbers, etc), all which support a unified system-wide theming.</p>
  
  <p>(Also, if this type of thing is easy enough to do using just native WPF controls and styles, that would be helpful to know as well.)</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: Since there appears to be no WPF control suite that actually works with MTM, we're being forced to use two separate testing tools at the sam time. Per several of the answers here, we're strongly leaning towards TestComplete. Hopefully the situation improves soon.</p>