Expert advice needed on selection of automation tool

Question

I'm posting here to seek a professional advice on choosing an automation tool for a desktop application. It's developed in C# and I need to test the UI part. Initially, I started using "coded test UI" and it worked well. Recently, while referring to some help on the tool on Microsoft site, I came across this

"Coded UI Test for automated UI-driven functional testing is deprecated. Visual Studio 2019 is the last version where Coded UI Test will be available. We recommend using Selenium for testing web apps and Appium with WinAppDriver for testing desktop and UWP apps."

I have no idea how to use Appium and how efficient it would be to record the tests and perform integration testing.

Question

1. Shall I continue exploring coded test UI OR
2. I shall switch to Appium? Any pointers which can provide through knowledge for beginners to start using this tool?

Answer 1

Appium basically works the same way as Selenium and testing web applications.

The main difference for you will be to use WindowsElement instead of WebElement.

There are great examples how to start with this on WinAppDriver github page. I would suggest starting there with writing easy tests for Windows Calculator.

In my work i'm using Appium with WinAppDriver and SpecFlow for writing BDD test cases. Underneath I'm writing glue code using C# & Page Object Pattern architecture. But I think you can use JavaScript or other languages if you prefer to.