I’ve been using Inspect.exe from the Windows SDK to examine the properties of a WinForms application but noticed that I didn’t see any of the properties (for example, the AutomationId) whilst running the application from Visual Studio (F5 to run.) However, if I ran the .exe from the bin\debug folder I could see the properties fine.
The source I was using was example code downloaded from UI Automation Custom Provider Samples – Part 3.
I’m wondering why this happened since I’m sure another machine that I had tried this on worked fine and I wasted time poking around in debug mode wondering why my UI Automation properties weren’t visible. Obviously there’s a workaround but I’d like to understand why this was happening and have a record of the problem for other people to find!
I’ve struck upon the answer – because I had launched Visual Studio as Administrator but the Inspect.exe tool as standard user then the properties being reported back were a sub-set of what I should have seen. As soon as I launched Inspect.exe as Administrator it worked!