Off and on I try and use the UIAutomation libraries from .NET 3.0 for a variety of things. Most often it is testing but not always. Since I do more unit testing than anything else I find LogicalTreeHelper, VisualTreeHelper and the AutomationPeer functionality more useful than AutomationElement.
On a recent project we were doing some work on a screen that wasn't particularly easy to get to. It took about 9 clicks. Not that bad but I'm lazy. We were doing a lot of fancy WPF stuff and we really wanted to see things live in the full application context instead of in Blend or just raw xaml. So we would run the app a lot. I got tired of doing the same clicks and occasionally making mistakes just to get the screen to show. So I chose to write a small app that would use UIAutomation to get me to the screen. Seemed simple enough. I've done plenty of work with UIAutomation and I thought it would be easy. Was I in for a suprise.
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Introduction

In this part we will closely examine such fundamentals of UI Automation as:

• UI Automation control patterns
• UI Automation properties
• UI Automation events

And in the end, we will try to implement a simple UI Automation support for custom control.