winui-ui-testing

Approach

The goal of this skill is to validate UI and app functionality automatically, without manual interaction, by exercising the app's UI elements, verifying their state, and asserting that the app behaves as expected under test conditions.

There are two main approaches:

1. Interactive exploration — manually run the app, use winapp ui <command> to explore the UI tree, find AutomationIds, verify element properties, and test functionality interactively. This is useful for discovery, but slow and expensive if repeated for every test iteration.
2. Scripted batch testing — generate a ui-tests.ps1 script that exercises all UI elements and asserts expected behavior in one pass. This allows you to run the tests automatically, capture results, and iterate quickly without manually interacting with the app each time.

Unless the user asked for interactive exploration, or you are unfamiliar with the code/app or need to explore the UI tree to discover AutomationIds for hidden or dynamically generated elements (flyouts, dialogs, lazy-loaded content), prefer scripted batch testing — it is faster, repeatable, and produces a record of pass/fail results that can be reviewed and acted on.

winapp ui Verbs

status, inspect, search, get-property, get-value, screenshot, invoke, click, set-value, focus, scroll, scroll-into-view, wait-for, list-windows, get-focused. Run winapp ui --cli-schema for the complete command structure as JSON, or winapp ui <verb> --help for any single verb.

Step 1: Use the Running App

If the app is already running, use its PID. Do NOT relaunch — use the PID already captured from the build step. If the app is not running, build and launch it using the guidance in the winui-dev-workflow skill.

Step 2: Write the Test Script