Extend coded UI tests and action recordings
Applies to: 
Visual Studio 
Visual Studio for Mac
Note
This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here
The testing framework for coded UI tests and action recordings does not support every possible user interface. It might not support the specific UI that you want to test. For example, you cannot immediately create a coded UI test or an action recording for a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. However, you can create your own extension to the coded UI test framework that supports your specific UI by taking advantage of the extensibility of the coded UI test framework.
Note
Coded UI Test for automated UI-driven functional testing is deprecated. Visual Studio 2019 is the last version where Coded UI Test will be fully available. We recommend using Playwright for testing web apps and Appium with WinAppDriver for testing desktop and UWP apps. Consider Xamarin.UITest for testing iOS and Android apps using the NUnit test framework. To reduce the impact on users some minimum support will still be available in Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4 or later.
Sample extension to test Microsoft Excel
This blog post contains a link to a sample extension for the coded UI test framework. You can also view the entire blog post series for coded UI test extensibility.
Note
The sample is intended for use with Microsoft Excel 2010. It may or may not work with other versions of Excel.