Remove, replace, or deprecate WinAppDriver templates?

[mrlacey]

7 months ago, after almost 2 years of no activity, the WinAppDriver team said that updates were coming but there's still no evidence of this.

X-Ref https://github.com/microsoft/WinAppDriver/issues/1371

Officially, Microsoft still "recommend using ... Appium with WinAppDriver for testing desktop and UWP apps."

But, the community seems to be giving up on WinAppDriver and looking at migrating to alternatives. (see comments in above issue as evidence of this.)

This raises two issues for WinTS:

1. Is it appropriate to keep the templates available in the wizard? (WinTS was created to help set developers up for success. Tacitly encouraging--by making the options available--the use of a technology that seems abandoned is likely setting people up with problems in the future.)
2. Many of the tests we have for verifying the generated apps use WinAppDriver. Do we need to consider migrating these to something else?

[fforjan]

Are you saying that even internal Microsoft teams are considering dropping WinAppDriver as the preferred testing technology ???

@kat-y You need more communication to the community and to the other Microsoft teams !!!

[mrlacey]

Are you saying that even internal Microsoft teams are considering dropping WinAppDriver as the preferred testing technology ???

I'm saying that as someone external to Microsoft but a contributor to this Microsoft project (among other things I pushed for including testing options in the wizard, wrote the templates for the UWP testing options, and wrote most of the generative UI tests used by the product) I have questions and uncertainty. There are plans to make big changes to the internal testing of generated projects. This would also be a good time to migrate to a different framework...