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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T16:00:02+00:00

I am currently trying to automate a Windows Forms application by using the Microsoft

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I am currently trying to automate a Windows Forms application by using the Microsoft UI Automation Library and C#, but I have big problems concerning the performance. The Identification of single elements by using a PropertyCondition or iterating over all elements of a window takes very long (up to 4 minutes). As soon as I have a AutomationElement, everything is fine (e.g. GetCurrentPropertyValue reacts within 100ms).

The poor performance only applies to one application. I don’t have access to the source but if something needs to be changed or checked, I can talk to the responsible programmer. As far as I know, some events (e.g. paint) were overwritten for the application. A typical window of the application contains about ~100 elements which are found by the FindAll method.

I also tried the COM interface of the UI automation library, which is about two times faster but this does not really solve the problem.

Does anyone have an idea how to solve this problem or experienced similar behavior?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    We found the answer when we took a closer look at the main loop. In most cases Application.Run is used to start up the main window and run the application but for some reason the following code was used:

    [...]    
    MainForm.Show();
    while DoStop == false
    {
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10);
        Application.DoEvents();
    }
[...]

    As the Microsoft UI Automation Library uses window messages, all the System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10); summed up and made the object detection become really slow. This does not happen, if Application.Run is used.

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