Visual Studio Load and Coded UI Dead! Now What?

14 March 2019, 06:37 PM

By Test Guild

I’ve recently received a number of emails regarding some changes made to Microsoft's Visual Studio’s testing option for functional test automation and load testing.

Folks have been asking me what they should now be using for their automation and performance testing needs.

Rather than respond to each email individually, I decided to create this quick post.

Microsoft CodedUI and Load Test End of Life

First, if you haven’t heard, the release notes for Visual Studio 2019 Microsoft have announced:

Visual Studio 2019 will be the last version of Visual Studio with load test features.
Visual Studio 2019 will be the final version of Visual Studio with Coded UI test features.

Why did Microsoft Kill Coded UI and Load Testing Features?

I’m not 100% sure why this move was made, but their release notes state that “UI test tools such as Selenium Appium have gained momentum and have a strong community backing.” Because these frameworks have become industry standards, they’ve apparently decided to depreciate these testing features.

I assume the same rationality was used to discontinue the load testing feature since there are lots of great open-source performance testing options.

The Automation and Performance Test Tools Microsoft Recommends

For Microsoft Visual Studio customers who require load testing tools, they recommend using alternate load testing tools like:

Apache JMeter
Akamai CloudTest
Blazemeter

When it comes to functional automation testing tools, Microsoft recommends:

Selenium for testing web applications
Appium with WinAppDriver for testing desktop and UWP apps.

What about Other Automation and Performance Tools?

Besides the testing tools Microsoft recommends, there are also a lot of other awesome open-source automation and performance testing tool options out there.

Here are some of my favorites: