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October 25, 2017
PC

Windows Application Driver is no longer in Beta!

We’re excited to announce the release of Windows Application Driver (WinAppDriver) version 1.0. This 1.0 release is the first WinAppDriver release without the Beta label. This release is a big milestone for the project which was first introduced during Build 2016 and has been growing in adoption.

What is WinAppDriver

Today, it’s easier than ever to build software for multiple platforms and devices. Microsoft supports any developer working on any platform to build software for any device. We’re showing this support in many tooling investments including .Net, UWP with .Net Standard, Rome, VS Code, Xamarin and WSL. In alignment with this vision we need a test tooling strategy that is equally cross platform and cross device, and that is where WinAppDriver fits in.

WinAppDriver is an open standards based tool for UI Test Automation. You can use WinAppDriver to run Automated UI tests for any application on Windows 10. The support for open standards means if you’ve been running UI Test Automation using Appium or Selenium, you can use your existing tools and preferred languages to write tests for Windows applications.

Version 1.0 Details

This release of WinAppDriver is our first non-Beta for a few reasons:

  1. WinAppDriver now supports the core set of features we initially aspired to back when we launched the project. This doesn’t mean we’re done, but we do feel confident about the supported set of features.
  2. Over the last year we’ve received feedback from the community and been improving WinAppDriver’s performance and quality based on that feedback. Thank you to everyone who participated! A big thank you to the Appium community for including WinAppDriver in the Appium installer.
  3. Removing the Beta label shows we believe strongly in the future of Open Standard based tools and plan to continue to invest in WinAppDriver.

Looking ahead

The WinAppDriver team’s focus is to continue building a feature rich and high performance set of tools for running Automated UI tests on Windows devices. This vision includes enabling support for more Windows devices, test scenarios and tool integrations.

The team is actively working on improvements that include:

  1. Addition to workflows such as Continuous Integration
  2. Multi-touch input support
  3. Pen input support
  4. Bringing WinAppDriver to additional Windows devices

Where can I get it?

You can find the v1.0 installer on the WinAppDriver project’s Github page where we also provide samples, documentation and issue tracking:
https://github.com/Microsoft/WinAppDriver/releases.

The next release of Appium (1.7.2) will install WinAppDriver v1.0 for you if you don’t already have it.

How do I provide feedback?

Please provide feedback on our Github issue board
https://github.com/Microsoft/WinAppDriver/issues

Stay Informed

To stay up to date with WinAppDriver news follow @mrhassanuz and @yosefdurr.

Summary

The v1.0 release of WinAppDriver is a major milestone which no longer has a Beta label.  Please try upgrading to v1.0 as soon as you can. If you haven’t tried WinAppDriver yet, now is a great time.

Thank you from the WinAppDriver Team!